AI Dataset Containing Child Sexual Abuse Images is a Consent Issue, Hany Farid Says

A large image dataset used to develop AI tools for detecting nudity contains a number of images of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), according to the Canadian Centre for Child Protection (C3P). 

 

The NudeNet dataset, which contains more than 700,000 images scraped from the internet, was used to train an AI image classifier which could automatically detect nudity in an image. C3P found that more than 250 academic works either cited or used the NudeNet dataset since it was available download from Academic Torrents, a platform for sharing research data, in June 2019...

 

“CSAM is illegal and hosting and distributing creates huge liabilities for the creators and researchers. There is also a larger ethical issue here in that the victims in these images have almost certainly not consented to have these images distributed and used in training,” Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley and one of the world’s leading experts on digitally manipulated images, told me in an email. 

 

Farid also developed PhotoDNA, a widely used image-identification and content filtering tool. “Even if the ends are noble, they don’t justify the means in this case...”