Bloomberg via Yahoo Finance: “A massive public dataset used to build popular artificial intelligence image generators contains at least 1,008 instances of child sexual abuse material, a new report from the Stanford Internet Observatory found. LAION-5B, which contains more than 5 billion images and related captions from the internet, may also include thousands of additional pieces of suspected child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, according to the report. The inclusion of CSAM in the dataset could enable AI products built on this data — including image generation tools like Stable Diffusion — to create new, and potentially realistic, child abuse content, the report warned. The rise of increasingly powerful AI tools has raised alarms in part because these services are built with troves of online data — including public datasets such as LAION-5B — that can contain copyrighted or harmful content. AI image generators, in particular, rely on datasets that include pairs of images and text descriptions to determine a wide range of concepts and create pictures in response to prompts from users…Much of the suspected CSAM content that the Stanford Internet Observatory found was validated by third parties like Canadian Centre for Child Protection and through a tool called PhotoDNA, developed by Microsoft Corp., according to the report. Given that the Stanford Internet Observatory researchers could only work with a limited portion of high-risk content, additional abusive content likely exists in the dataset, the report said…”