12 ms·

Megaface

288 points by gennarro 4y ago

colesantiago 4y ago
"All photos included a Creative Commons licenses, but most were not licensed for commercial use." I wonder what the implications are for Stable Diffusion, DALLE and Midjourney since that art images on the internet are copyrighted by default. Even with a fair use argument, there are examples in cases where AI was generating art that included the signatures of artists. https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2022/12/lensa-ai-art-images-without-consent.html https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2022/12/lensa-ai-art-images-withou...
- ilikehurdles 4y ago
  > Stability AI is happy to follow copyright laws for their music model, because they know that music labels will hold them accountable. So this seems like a good time to point out to larger companies like @WaltDisneyCo that their copyrighted material is being stolen and used too I mean this is a pretty good point. If they're so sure this is legal, then train on copyrighted audio+video media as they already do with copyrighted visual media.
  - zarzavat 4y ago
    Avoiding doing something because you don't want to get sued and subjected to a lengthy court battle is completely rational and it doesn't mean that doing that thing is illegal. For example, for decades many TV shows came up with their own lyrics for Happy Birthday song, even though it was well known that the song wasn't copyrighted, because nobody wanted to get sued and fight that battle. Easier to just change a few words in the script.
    - int_19h 4y ago
      It's not just legal issues that'll lead to self-regulation. It's also stuff like this: https://imgur.com/a/vAqCUP7 https://imgur.com/a/vAqCUP7
  - devalidating 4y ago
    Simply put, there is less information in music. Copyright infringement cases have been won on as little as a handful of notes. So the likelihood of a copyrightable element from the underlying showing up in the model's output is that much higher. A single melody represents a similar portion of all possible melodies as does a color all possible colors and certainly less than the fraction represented by a single color palette. Yet you cannot copyright a color palette but you can a melody. Copyright law regarding audio media is entire different beast than visual media; the case law and fair use technicalities do not always line up as simply as "if its legal on visual media it must also be legal on audio."
- gwern 4y ago
  This is apples and oranges. SD et al are defended on the grounds of being transformative use (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use): they do not distribute (ie copy) the original training images, and they are not a derivative work due to transformativeness, so the license of the original images is completely irrelevant. (Details like 'signatures' are also irrelevant: if I write a style parody of William Shakespeare and add a '--Willy Shakespeare' at the end to round it off, have I revealed that I have secretly copied his work? Of course not. It's just plausible that there would be a name there, so I came up with a name.) The criticism here is that distributing (copying) the original image violates the non-commercial clause of the original images because someone, somewhere, might somehow have made money in some way because the dataset exists; but as they somewhat lamely acknowledge later, what counts as 'commercial' has never been clearly defined, and it probably can't be defined (because for most people 'commercial' seems to be defined by 'ewww'), and this is why CC-NC licenses are heavily discouraged by WMF and other FLOSS groups and weren't part of FLOSS from the beginning even though Stallman was in large part attacking commercial exploitation.
  - schemescape 4y ago
    Does anyone know if attempts have been made to trick these ML models into reproducing original copyrighted inputs verbatim (edit: or close enough)? Edit: Asking about verbatim copies wasn't really a great question. I should have asked about producing things that are "close enough to cause legal trouble" (whether that be due to copyright, trademark, or something else).
    - Scaevolus 4y ago
      That's a known failure mode called "overfitting" or "memorization", where a specific input text is very accurately reproduced. I'm not aware of it occurring for any copyrighted inputs, but it occurs for many famous artworks-- it's nearly impossible to convince Stable Diffusion to style "Mona Lisa" at all.
    - sdenton4 4y ago
      That's not really how memorization in neutral networks works. For classifiers, memorization is more like learning a hash function and a lookup table; no need to store the full image at all. Even for very large models, the weights are a tiny fraction of the size of the original data. It's probably helpful to think of embeddings for generative models in a similar way; it's a very specific embedding function, like a locality sensitive hash, which doesn't require actually storing the data.
- polygamous_bat 4y ago
  > Even with a fair use argument, there are examples in cases where AI was generating art that included the signatures of artists. I went through the post, and I am not sure whether I agree with the analysis of the examples. Diffusion models are conceptual parrots, and it is possible that "25% images contain a scribble in the bottom right corner, so the model will make a scribble in the corner" is what is being construed as a signature in this post. I think a large part of outrage from the artists about diffusion model "stealing" art comes from a place of disbelief that machines can be this good without "stealing", and it's perfectly natural. In fact, it's unnatural to me how good machines have gotten in image generation, and it is a field I've been following for five years now. However, because I understand the model and can implement it myself, I can convince myself it doesn't need to steal, just needs to be able to model correlations at some ungodly level.
  - zowie_vd 4y ago
    >I think a large part of outrage from the artists about diffusion model "stealing" art comes from a place of disbelief that machines can be this good without "stealing" I think when you make machines that automate away some people's passion and purpose in life, of course they're going to be upset. When, on top of that, the machine automating their work is a "conceptual parrot" that is parroting the concepts they invented without their permission, of course they're going to be pissed off. Besides, whilst AI image generators don't steal exact elements from the training data, they do basically steal the artstyles and subject matter of illustrators, which takes them many years to foster. Imagine an illustrator of fantasy book covers hardly being able to find work anymore because some publishers figured out that, instead of hiring him, they could cheaply hire an unskilled person from a third world country to type the illustrator's name into an AI image generator so that it imitates his works, along with a few keywords for the book in question, until eventually something good pops out. That is currently considered fair use in US copyright law, but in my opinion it is nonetheless so unjust that it justifies calling it "stealing".
cshimmin 4y ago
Hmmm... June 11, 2020: MegaFace dataset is now decommissioned. University of Washington has ceased distributing the MegaFace dataset citing the challenge has concluded and that maintenance of their platform would be too burdensome.
georgeglue1 4y ago
Are there any licenses that are generally permissive, but prohibit certain programmatic, law enforcement, government, etc. usecases? It'd be interesting legal territory if someone has tried this already.
- 542458 4y ago
  IANAL. I don’t think you can prevent scraping or use in ML corpuses in this way. Copyright prevents the creation of non-transformative copies of a work other than some protected use cases (parody, education, etc). All OSS licenses do is provide a right to copy a work provided certain conditions (attribution, copy left) are met. But the general legal consensus as far as I know is that most ML models meet the threshold for being a new transformative work, so copyright doesn’t apply. Accordingly, you can’t use copyright to prevent something from being part of a ML corpus. That said, I if your question is broader than the article… if you’re just talking about non-transformative uses (I.e., just using open source software) I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t create a license that doesn’t allow software to be deployed into certain environments. Some examples: https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/ocb/license2.pdf https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/ocb/license2.pdf https://www.linux.com/news/open-source-project-adds-no-military-use-clause-gpl/ https://www.linux.com/news/open-source-project-adds-no-milit... No idea how these would do in court though.
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    > But the general legal consensus as far as I know is that most ML models meet the threshold for being a new transformative work, so copyright doesn’t apply. Has this been tested in court yet?
    - jefftk 4y ago
      It hasn't yet. I think this is the central claim of the GitHub co-pilot suit. There's a prediction market on whether the suit will be successful, which is currently at 43%: https://manifold.markets/JeffKaufman/will-the-github-copilot-litigation https://manifold.markets/JeffKaufman/will-the-github-copilot...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gardenhedge 4y ago
It strikes me as sad that people's photos have been taken a used to train a technology for a corporate profit. People just wanted to share their wedding photos.
- ironmagma 4y ago
  It's no worry, someday that data will be so ubiquitous and well-studied that it won't even be profitable, it will just be trivial to construct or deconstruct any face.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- fleddr 4y ago
  I agree, but why would one share wedding photos using an open license like Creative Commons?
  - tomrod 4y ago
    Because regulations are generally unknown to folks who don't spend their time solving tech problems. People simply assumed they could share it easily with friends and family.
    - fleddr 4y ago
      This doesn't match my experience, and I run a photo community myself. You're absolutely right that people are generally fairly clueless about licenses, especially in the amateur domain. And the main implication of that is that they don't bother with it at all and leave it at whatever the default is, which typically is "copyrighted, all rights reserved". Those explicitly tinkering with licenses, which is a purposeful action, tend to actually know (somewhat) what they are doing. Further, if you leave a photo's license to its default, copyrighted, absolutely nothing stops you from sharing it with friends and family. What would happen? You share it with them and then sue yourself? Similarly, somebody you don't even know could use your copyrighted image and post it on social media. Again, nothing happens, as this is widespread behavior and called "fair use", which it legally absolutely isn't. But nobody cares, as nobody will sue over it unless there is a case of vast commercial usage.
samwillis 4y ago
One of the difficulties with these training datasets is the currently understood rules around web scraping. The current legal precedent [0] is that web scraping is perfectly legal, despite what is in the websites terms of service, "licence" or robots.txt. If a human can navigate to it freely, you can scrape it using automated means. What you can't do with scraped data is republish it verbatim. Doing a data analysis on scraped data is permitted by law, and you can publish your analysis of that data. The question is, is an AI model trained on scraped data a derived analysis that is therefore legal? Or is it republishing of the original data? We need a test case to find out. In the case of this dataset, I don't think the CC license applies to people using it. It "may" apply to redistribution of it for free. If the dataset was sold, that would be a violation. I suspect (after tested in court) a model trained on this dataset would be allowed despite the CC license on the photos. Personally, in this case I think the ethics committee of the University should have put up barriers to the project. The morals of this are questionable at best. 0: https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/18/web-scraping-legal-court/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/18/web-scraping-legal-court/
- KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago
  You can do the scraping in a jurisdiction where it is legal.
  - pbhjpbhj 4y ago
    Importing (in the geographical sense) the data would still be infringing, you've just scraped it in a convoluted way -- legal systems in my limited experience take account of such things.
  - traceroute66 4y ago
    > You can do the scraping in a jurisdiction where it is legal. No such thing with GDPR. Why do you think so many US websites take the lazy-ass approach and block EU visitors to their websites ? Simple, its because either you comply with GDPR or you don't process the information of citizens of GDPR covered countries. End of story.
hrkucuk 4y ago
Are all these faces white?
- Zamicol 4y ago
  No.
sschueller 4y ago
This datasets usage and creation violates Swiss law [1]. Any person in Switzerland has the right to their face in any picture taken now and any time in the future even if taken by someone else. Without the explicit consent of a person, their face may not be used or published in anyway or form. There are only a few exceptions like for public figures and celebrities but even then they also have a right to privacy. SRF once did a segment about face recognition and public photos from social media. Under strict supervision and journalism protection they created a data set and showed what was possible. The dataset and code was then destroyed. [2] Similar laws exist in EU states as well. [1] https://www.edoeb.admin.ch/edoeb/de/home/datenschutz/Internet_und_Computer/veroeffentlichung-von-fotos.html https://www.edoeb.admin.ch/edoeb/de/home/datenschutz/Interne... [2] https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/automatische-gesichtserkennung-so-einfach-ist-es-eine-ueberwachungsmaschine-zu-bauen https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/automatische-gesichtserkennu...
- sacrosancty 4y ago
  [dead]
- p-e-w 4y ago
  > This datasets usage and creation violates Swiss law And drinking alcohol violates Saudi Arabian law. Unless the institutions involved are subject to Swiss jurisdiction (which doesn't appear to be the case), this doesn't mean much. If anything, the blame lies with the Swiss government, which allowed a foreign company (Flickr) to operate in Switzerland without adequate guarantees that this company would protect Swiss users' data from unlawful applications. But like most other governments, they were happy to let US tech giants bait their own citizens into giving them boatloads of personal data, which ended up outside of the regulatory control of said governments. Any complaints now are just posturing. The time to act was 15 years ago.
  - smaudet 4y ago
    Can't agree, if an assassin illegaly enters a country and commits a crime, the blame falls on the miscreant for their behavior not the country for failing to notice the deceptive miscreant. You would have to demonstrate the Swiss govt was made aware of Flickr before they were a thing there and then failed to ban them, for this line of reasoning to make any sense...
MuffinFlavored 4y ago
Slighty unrelated, how many "distinguishable/unique" faces/facial styles are there in terms of like "broad categories?" Obviously hard to define but as somebody who moved around a lot growing up, I would catch my brain thinking I'd recognize somebody (quite often) only to remember I was in a totally different state than where the person I thought I was recognizing lived.
Imnimo 4y ago
If I understand correctly, this dataset isn't even being used to train commercial facial recognition models, it's just being used to benchmark them? The implication seems to be that it should be illegal to even apply an algorithm (of any sort) to an image that you don't have a commercial license for?
jonplackett 4y ago
Anyone know have any stats on the ethnicities and genera of the people in this dataset? Is this still widely used to test face recognition?
- wongarsu 4y ago
  There is the DiveFace dataset/metadata [1], which is a subset of the Megaface dataset with six equally sized groups: three ethnicities times two genders. 1: https://github.com/BiDAlab/DiveFace https://github.com/BiDAlab/DiveFace
hk__2 4y ago
(2021) > Last updated: Jan 23, 2021
Jerry2 4y ago
It's unfortunate they removed it. Is there a public mirror/torrent of it by any chance?
rsync 4y ago
What's going to happen when (not if) it becomes cheap and simple to mock up your own head and you "present" that in multiple locations, simultaneously ? It's interesting to think about how these systems (and their human operators) will react when their system recognizes, with certainty, that X is in two places (or 15) at once ... ... or if X is recorded somewhere (Zurich) and then two hours later at an impossible distance (San Francisco) ... In a way, it's the opposite of the "Sigil" plot device in Gibsons _Zero History_ wherein the wearer was invisible to security camera networks.[1] Instead, the operator of this network of clones aspires to be on as many cameras as possible. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_History
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- smaudet 4y ago
  Indeed - the (security/social/economical) issues these systems will pose are nearly boundless, something as ill considered and will in hindsight be as obviously shortsighted and the early naivete of the first internet users, who saw no issue with unencrypted communications, centralized unscaling systems, and complete lack of security credentials...
williamscales 4y ago
How can I find out if one of my photos was used against its license? And then I suppose I can sue them, right?
scotty79 4y ago
That's interesting. If someone creates work A and doesn't allow commercial use, but you create your work B derived from A and you publish it without commercial use restriction then somebody uses your work B commercially, were the conditions that creator of A set violated? And if so, by whom? Does it depend on how transformative was your work B?
aaron695 4y ago
[dead]
underlines 4y ago
Challenge this: If I am legally allowed to look at a million pictures to learn how to draw in different art styles, or even how to imitate a very certain art style, I basically train weights and biases in my brain. If StabilityAi does the same with pictures available online, and release the weights and biases as Stable Diffusion, how is this different from humans learning from that data?
- dandelany 4y ago
  Law does not work by analogy. The difference is obvious - one of them is an automated computer system, the other is a human. As mentioned above it is not clear whether use/redistribution of this data is legal. But generally speaking, drawing an analogy between a piece of software and a human being is not an argument that will hold any weight in court.
  - p-e-w 4y ago
    This is the correct answer to any question such as the above. The law is an instrument of power. At the most basic level, its purpose is to uphold the power of a select group of individuals and institutions. The law's purpose is not to bend to logical arguments. If it did, those with the most complete grasp of logic would have the most power, undermining what the law is ultimately designed to do.
Tepix 4y ago
I think many (if not most) people are opposed to their images being used for facial recognition related purposes (training, evaluation, services, …) I hope creative commons will create a new license like that explicitly prohibits the use of the protected works for these purposes. Of course, in this particular case a university gathered the images (violating the citation requirement) and then companies used them commercially, violating another aspect of the license. I guess UWash is at fault for not stating that Megaface cannot be used for commercial purposes? Are the researchers at UWash personally liable? Is the university? If we get a couple of deterring judgements there's a chance this will stop future violantions.
- re-lre-l 4y ago
  I agree. But one has to understand that if something has been uploaded into internet it's going to be public by default - this is how I treat the internet. And no license will solve it.
bawolff 4y ago
I think that's part of the problem with non-commercial licenses. Its very confusing what it means. It clearly means that you can't directly sell it. What about using non-commercial work on a page with ads? What about selling web hosting to someone using NC works? The last one sounds rediculous, but what really is the difference from a strict logical perspective? You are making money off the non-comercial work after all as without it there would be no web hosting to sell.

288 points by gennarro 4y ago

"All photos included a Creative Commons licenses, but most were not licensed for commercial use." I wonder what the implications are for Stable Diffusion, DALLE and Midjourney since that art images on the internet are copyrighted by default. Even with a fair use argument, there are examples in cases where AI was generating art that included the signatures of artists. https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2022/12/lensa-ai-art-images-without-consent.html https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2022/12/lensa-ai-art-images-withou...

ilikehurdles 4y ago
> Stability AI is happy to follow copyright laws for their music model, because they know that music labels will hold them accountable. So this seems like a good time to point out to larger companies like @WaltDisneyCo that their copyrighted material is being stolen and used too I mean this is a pretty good point. If they're so sure this is legal, then train on copyrighted audio+video media as they already do with copyrighted visual media.
- zarzavat 4y ago
  Avoiding doing something because you don't want to get sued and subjected to a lengthy court battle is completely rational and it doesn't mean that doing that thing is illegal. For example, for decades many TV shows came up with their own lyrics for Happy Birthday song, even though it was well known that the song wasn't copyrighted, because nobody wanted to get sued and fight that battle. Easier to just change a few words in the script.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    It's not just legal issues that'll lead to self-regulation. It's also stuff like this: https://imgur.com/a/vAqCUP7 https://imgur.com/a/vAqCUP7
- devalidating 4y ago
  Simply put, there is less information in music. Copyright infringement cases have been won on as little as a handful of notes. So the likelihood of a copyrightable element from the underlying showing up in the model's output is that much higher. A single melody represents a similar portion of all possible melodies as does a color all possible colors and certainly less than the fraction represented by a single color palette. Yet you cannot copyright a color palette but you can a melody. Copyright law regarding audio media is entire different beast than visual media; the case law and fair use technicalities do not always line up as simply as "if its legal on visual media it must also be legal on audio."
gwern 4y ago
This is apples and oranges. SD et al are defended on the grounds of being transformative use (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use): they do not distribute (ie copy) the original training images, and they are not a derivative work due to transformativeness, so the license of the original images is completely irrelevant. (Details like 'signatures' are also irrelevant: if I write a style parody of William Shakespeare and add a '--Willy Shakespeare' at the end to round it off, have I revealed that I have secretly copied his work? Of course not. It's just plausible that there would be a name there, so I came up with a name.) The criticism here is that distributing (copying) the original image violates the non-commercial clause of the original images because someone, somewhere, might somehow have made money in some way because the dataset exists; but as they somewhat lamely acknowledge later, what counts as 'commercial' has never been clearly defined, and it probably can't be defined (because for most people 'commercial' seems to be defined by 'ewww'), and this is why CC-NC licenses are heavily discouraged by WMF and other FLOSS groups and weren't part of FLOSS from the beginning even though Stallman was in large part attacking commercial exploitation.
- schemescape 4y ago
  Does anyone know if attempts have been made to trick these ML models into reproducing original copyrighted inputs verbatim (edit: or close enough)? Edit: Asking about verbatim copies wasn't really a great question. I should have asked about producing things that are "close enough to cause legal trouble" (whether that be due to copyright, trademark, or something else).
  - Scaevolus 4y ago
    That's a known failure mode called "overfitting" or "memorization", where a specific input text is very accurately reproduced. I'm not aware of it occurring for any copyrighted inputs, but it occurs for many famous artworks-- it's nearly impossible to convince Stable Diffusion to style "Mona Lisa" at all.
  - sdenton4 4y ago
    That's not really how memorization in neutral networks works. For classifiers, memorization is more like learning a hash function and a lookup table; no need to store the full image at all. Even for very large models, the weights are a tiny fraction of the size of the original data. It's probably helpful to think of embeddings for generative models in a similar way; it's a very specific embedding function, like a locality sensitive hash, which doesn't require actually storing the data.
polygamous_bat 4y ago
> Even with a fair use argument, there are examples in cases where AI was generating art that included the signatures of artists. I went through the post, and I am not sure whether I agree with the analysis of the examples. Diffusion models are conceptual parrots, and it is possible that "25% images contain a scribble in the bottom right corner, so the model will make a scribble in the corner" is what is being construed as a signature in this post. I think a large part of outrage from the artists about diffusion model "stealing" art comes from a place of disbelief that machines can be this good without "stealing", and it's perfectly natural. In fact, it's unnatural to me how good machines have gotten in image generation, and it is a field I've been following for five years now. However, because I understand the model and can implement it myself, I can convince myself it doesn't need to steal, just needs to be able to model correlations at some ungodly level.
- zowie_vd 4y ago
  >I think a large part of outrage from the artists about diffusion model "stealing" art comes from a place of disbelief that machines can be this good without "stealing" I think when you make machines that automate away some people's passion and purpose in life, of course they're going to be upset. When, on top of that, the machine automating their work is a "conceptual parrot" that is parroting the concepts they invented without their permission, of course they're going to be pissed off. Besides, whilst AI image generators don't steal exact elements from the training data, they do basically steal the artstyles and subject matter of illustrators, which takes them many years to foster. Imagine an illustrator of fantasy book covers hardly being able to find work anymore because some publishers figured out that, instead of hiring him, they could cheaply hire an unskilled person from a third world country to type the illustrator's name into an AI image generator so that it imitates his works, along with a few keywords for the book in question, until eventually something good pops out. That is currently considered fair use in US copyright law, but in my opinion it is nonetheless so unjust that it justifies calling it "stealing".

cshimmin 4y ago

Hmmm... June 11, 2020: MegaFace dataset is now decommissioned. University of Washington has ceased distributing the MegaFace dataset citing the challenge has concluded and that maintenance of their platform would be too burdensome.

georgeglue1 4y ago

Are there any licenses that are generally permissive, but prohibit certain programmatic, law enforcement, government, etc. usecases? It'd be interesting legal territory if someone has tried this already.

542458 4y ago
IANAL. I don’t think you can prevent scraping or use in ML corpuses in this way. Copyright prevents the creation of non-transformative copies of a work other than some protected use cases (parody, education, etc). All OSS licenses do is provide a right to copy a work provided certain conditions (attribution, copy left) are met. But the general legal consensus as far as I know is that most ML models meet the threshold for being a new transformative work, so copyright doesn’t apply. Accordingly, you can’t use copyright to prevent something from being part of a ML corpus. That said, I if your question is broader than the article… if you’re just talking about non-transformative uses (I.e., just using open source software) I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t create a license that doesn’t allow software to be deployed into certain environments. Some examples: https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/ocb/license2.pdf https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/ocb/license2.pdf https://www.linux.com/news/open-source-project-adds-no-military-use-clause-gpl/ https://www.linux.com/news/open-source-project-adds-no-milit... No idea how these would do in court though.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  > But the general legal consensus as far as I know is that most ML models meet the threshold for being a new transformative work, so copyright doesn’t apply. Has this been tested in court yet?
  - jefftk 4y ago
    It hasn't yet. I think this is the central claim of the GitHub co-pilot suit. There's a prediction market on whether the suit will be successful, which is currently at 43%: https://manifold.markets/JeffKaufman/will-the-github-copilot-litigation https://manifold.markets/JeffKaufman/will-the-github-copilot...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

gardenhedge 4y ago

It strikes me as sad that people's photos have been taken a used to train a technology for a corporate profit. People just wanted to share their wedding photos.

ironmagma 4y ago
It's no worry, someday that data will be so ubiquitous and well-studied that it won't even be profitable, it will just be trivial to construct or deconstruct any face.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
fleddr 4y ago
I agree, but why would one share wedding photos using an open license like Creative Commons?
- tomrod 4y ago
  Because regulations are generally unknown to folks who don't spend their time solving tech problems. People simply assumed they could share it easily with friends and family.
  - fleddr 4y ago
    This doesn't match my experience, and I run a photo community myself. You're absolutely right that people are generally fairly clueless about licenses, especially in the amateur domain. And the main implication of that is that they don't bother with it at all and leave it at whatever the default is, which typically is "copyrighted, all rights reserved". Those explicitly tinkering with licenses, which is a purposeful action, tend to actually know (somewhat) what they are doing. Further, if you leave a photo's license to its default, copyrighted, absolutely nothing stops you from sharing it with friends and family. What would happen? You share it with them and then sue yourself? Similarly, somebody you don't even know could use your copyrighted image and post it on social media. Again, nothing happens, as this is widespread behavior and called "fair use", which it legally absolutely isn't. But nobody cares, as nobody will sue over it unless there is a case of vast commercial usage.

samwillis 4y ago

One of the difficulties with these training datasets is the currently understood rules around web scraping. The current legal precedent [0] is that web scraping is perfectly legal, despite what is in the websites terms of service, "licence" or robots.txt. If a human can navigate to it freely, you can scrape it using automated means. What you can't do with scraped data is republish it verbatim. Doing a data analysis on scraped data is permitted by law, and you can publish your analysis of that data. The question is, is an AI model trained on scraped data a derived analysis that is therefore legal? Or is it republishing of the original data? We need a test case to find out. In the case of this dataset, I don't think the CC license applies to people using it. It "may" apply to redistribution of it for free. If the dataset was sold, that would be a violation. I suspect (after tested in court) a model trained on this dataset would be allowed despite the CC license on the photos. Personally, in this case I think the ethics committee of the University should have put up barriers to the project. The morals of this are questionable at best. 0: https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/18/web-scraping-legal-court/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/18/web-scraping-legal-court/

KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago
You can do the scraping in a jurisdiction where it is legal.
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  Importing (in the geographical sense) the data would still be infringing, you've just scraped it in a convoluted way -- legal systems in my limited experience take account of such things.
- traceroute66 4y ago
  > You can do the scraping in a jurisdiction where it is legal. No such thing with GDPR. Why do you think so many US websites take the lazy-ass approach and block EU visitors to their websites ? Simple, its because either you comply with GDPR or you don't process the information of citizens of GDPR covered countries. End of story.

hrkucuk 4y ago

Are all these faces white?

Zamicol 4y ago
No.

sschueller 4y ago

This datasets usage and creation violates Swiss law [1]. Any person in Switzerland has the right to their face in any picture taken now and any time in the future even if taken by someone else. Without the explicit consent of a person, their face may not be used or published in anyway or form. There are only a few exceptions like for public figures and celebrities but even then they also have a right to privacy. SRF once did a segment about face recognition and public photos from social media. Under strict supervision and journalism protection they created a data set and showed what was possible. The dataset and code was then destroyed. [2] Similar laws exist in EU states as well. [1] https://www.edoeb.admin.ch/edoeb/de/home/datenschutz/Internet_und_Computer/veroeffentlichung-von-fotos.html https://www.edoeb.admin.ch/edoeb/de/home/datenschutz/Interne... [2] https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/automatische-gesichtserkennung-so-einfach-ist-es-eine-ueberwachungsmaschine-zu-bauen https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/automatische-gesichtserkennu...

sacrosancty 4y ago
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p-e-w 4y ago
> This datasets usage and creation violates Swiss law And drinking alcohol violates Saudi Arabian law. Unless the institutions involved are subject to Swiss jurisdiction (which doesn't appear to be the case), this doesn't mean much. If anything, the blame lies with the Swiss government, which allowed a foreign company (Flickr) to operate in Switzerland without adequate guarantees that this company would protect Swiss users' data from unlawful applications. But like most other governments, they were happy to let US tech giants bait their own citizens into giving them boatloads of personal data, which ended up outside of the regulatory control of said governments. Any complaints now are just posturing. The time to act was 15 years ago.
- smaudet 4y ago
  Can't agree, if an assassin illegaly enters a country and commits a crime, the blame falls on the miscreant for their behavior not the country for failing to notice the deceptive miscreant. You would have to demonstrate the Swiss govt was made aware of Flickr before they were a thing there and then failed to ban them, for this line of reasoning to make any sense...

MuffinFlavored 4y ago

Slighty unrelated, how many "distinguishable/unique" faces/facial styles are there in terms of like "broad categories?" Obviously hard to define but as somebody who moved around a lot growing up, I would catch my brain thinking I'd recognize somebody (quite often) only to remember I was in a totally different state than where the person I thought I was recognizing lived.

Imnimo 4y ago

If I understand correctly, this dataset isn't even being used to train commercial facial recognition models, it's just being used to benchmark them? The implication seems to be that it should be illegal to even apply an algorithm (of any sort) to an image that you don't have a commercial license for?

jonplackett 4y ago

Anyone know have any stats on the ethnicities and genera of the people in this dataset? Is this still widely used to test face recognition?

wongarsu 4y ago
There is the DiveFace dataset/metadata [1], which is a subset of the Megaface dataset with six equally sized groups: three ethnicities times two genders. 1: https://github.com/BiDAlab/DiveFace https://github.com/BiDAlab/DiveFace

hk__2 4y ago

(2021) > Last updated: Jan 23, 2021

Jerry2 4y ago

It's unfortunate they removed it. Is there a public mirror/torrent of it by any chance?

rsync 4y ago

What's going to happen when (not if) it becomes cheap and simple to mock up your own head and you "present" that in multiple locations, simultaneously ? It's interesting to think about how these systems (and their human operators) will react when their system recognizes, with certainty, that X is in two places (or 15) at once ... ... or if X is recorded somewhere (Zurich) and then two hours later at an impossible distance (San Francisco) ... In a way, it's the opposite of the "Sigil" plot device in Gibsons _Zero History_ wherein the wearer was invisible to security camera networks.[1] Instead, the operator of this network of clones aspires to be on as many cameras as possible. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_History

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
smaudet 4y ago
Indeed - the (security/social/economical) issues these systems will pose are nearly boundless, something as ill considered and will in hindsight be as obviously shortsighted and the early naivete of the first internet users, who saw no issue with unencrypted communications, centralized unscaling systems, and complete lack of security credentials...

williamscales 4y ago

How can I find out if one of my photos was used against its license? And then I suppose I can sue them, right?

scotty79 4y ago

That's interesting. If someone creates work A and doesn't allow commercial use, but you create your work B derived from A and you publish it without commercial use restriction then somebody uses your work B commercially, were the conditions that creator of A set violated? And if so, by whom? Does it depend on how transformative was your work B?

aaron695 4y ago

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underlines 4y ago

Challenge this: If I am legally allowed to look at a million pictures to learn how to draw in different art styles, or even how to imitate a very certain art style, I basically train weights and biases in my brain. If StabilityAi does the same with pictures available online, and release the weights and biases as Stable Diffusion, how is this different from humans learning from that data?

dandelany 4y ago
Law does not work by analogy. The difference is obvious - one of them is an automated computer system, the other is a human. As mentioned above it is not clear whether use/redistribution of this data is legal. But generally speaking, drawing an analogy between a piece of software and a human being is not an argument that will hold any weight in court.
- p-e-w 4y ago
  This is the correct answer to any question such as the above. The law is an instrument of power. At the most basic level, its purpose is to uphold the power of a select group of individuals and institutions. The law's purpose is not to bend to logical arguments. If it did, those with the most complete grasp of logic would have the most power, undermining what the law is ultimately designed to do.

Tepix 4y ago

I think many (if not most) people are opposed to their images being used for facial recognition related purposes (training, evaluation, services, …) I hope creative commons will create a new license like that explicitly prohibits the use of the protected works for these purposes. Of course, in this particular case a university gathered the images (violating the citation requirement) and then companies used them commercially, violating another aspect of the license. I guess UWash is at fault for not stating that Megaface cannot be used for commercial purposes? Are the researchers at UWash personally liable? Is the university? If we get a couple of deterring judgements there's a chance this will stop future violantions.

re-lre-l 4y ago
I agree. But one has to understand that if something has been uploaded into internet it's going to be public by default - this is how I treat the internet. And no license will solve it.

bawolff 4y ago

I think that's part of the problem with non-commercial licenses. Its very confusing what it means. It clearly means that you can't directly sell it. What about using non-commercial work on a page with ads? What about selling web hosting to someone using NC works? The last one sounds rediculous, but what really is the difference from a strict logical perspective? You are making money off the non-comercial work after all as without it there would be no web hosting to sell.