"Brazil: Children’s Personal Photos Misused to Power AI Tools", 10 June 2024

...The personal photos of Brazilian children are being used to create powerful artificial intelligence (AI) tools without the children’s knowledge or consent, Human Rights Watch said today. These photos are being scraped off the web into a large data set that companies then use to train their AI tools. In turn, others are using these tools to create malicious deepfakes that put even more children at risk of exploitation and harm...

Analysis by Human Rights Watch found that LAION-5B, a data set used to train popular AI tools and built by scraping most of the internet, contains links to identifiable photos of Brazilian children. Some children’s names are listed in the accompanying caption or the URL where the image is stored. In many cases, their identities are easily traceable, including information on when and where the child was at the time their photo was taken...

...They do not appear to be otherwise possible to find through an online search. Some of these photos were posted by children, their parents, or their family on personal blogs and photo- and video-sharing sites. Some were uploaded years or even a decade before LAION-5B was created...

Likewise, the presence of Brazilian children in LAION-5B contributes to the ability of AI models trained on this data set to produce realistic imagery of Brazilian children. This substantially amplifies the existing risk children face that someone will steal their likeness from photos or videos of themselves posted online and use AI to manipulate them into saying or doing things that they never said or did...

In response, LAION, the German nonprofit that manages LAION-5B, confirmed that the data set contained the children’s personal photos found by Human Rights Watch and pledged to remove them. It disputed that AI models trained on LAION-5B could reproduce personal data verbatim. LAION also said that children and their guardians were responsible for removing children’s personal photos from the internet, which it argued was the most effective protection against misuse...