This is your regular reminder that the LAION dataset does not itself contain any image data at all: it is an index of image URLs on the the public internet whic

This is your regular reminder that the LAION dataset does not itself contain any image data at all: it is an index of image URLs on the the public internet which has been classified as having decent-quality tagging (image alt-text) and a few other bits of bulk, automated analysis done. The accessibility of CSAM content links within the dataset means those images are already on the internet being made publicly accessible by another website, which was found during the LAION image crawl. (interestingly this does rather imply that if LAION was able to compare images to the relevant CSAM hashes during the crawl then they'd simply be able to exclude them automatically - although I imagine that database is always growing)