Child abuse images removed from AI image-generator training source, researchers say

Artificial intelligence researchers said Friday that they have deleted more than 2,000 web links to suspected child sexual abuse imagery from a database used to train popular AI image-generator tools. The research database — called LAION — is a huge index of online images and captions that’s been a source for leading AI image-makers such as Stable Diffusion and Midjourney. But a report last year by the Stanford Internet Observatory found it contained links to sexually explicit images of children, contributing to the ease with which some AI tools have been able to produce photorealistic deepfakes that depict children.