AI Data Laundering: How Academic and Nonprofit Researchers Shield Tech Companies from Accountability

https://waxy.org/2022/09/ai-data-laundering-how-academic-and-nonprofit-researchers-shield-tech-companies-from-accountability/

 

“Simon Willison created a Datasette browser to explore WebVid-10M, one of the two datasets used to train the video generation model, and quickly learned that all 10.7 million video clips were scraped from Shutterstock, watermarks and all.”

 

“In addition to the Shutterstock clips, Meta also used 10 million video clips from this 100M video dataset from Microsoft Research Asia. It’s not mentioned on their GitHub, but if you dig into the paper, you learn that every clip came from over 3 million YouTube videos.”

 

“It’s become standard practice for technology companies working with AI to commercially use datasets and models collected and trained by non-commercial research entities like universities or non-profits.”

 

“Like with the artists, photographers, and other creators found in the 2.3 billion images that trained Stable Diffusion, I can’t help but wonder how the creators of those 3 million YouTube videos feel about Meta using their work to train their new model.”

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