img2dataset

R departments of companies like Google have, like you, misused the terms opt-out and opt-in in deceptive ways. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37314981

evidence these tags are being treated as optional suggestions rather than firm boundaries: - Various creators have reported issues with these tags being ignored. For instance, a discussion on DeviantArt (https://www.deviantart.com/lumaris/journal/NoAI-meta-tag-is-NOT-honored-by-DA-9414…) documents cases where the tags weren't honored, with references to GitHub conversations showing implementation issues - In a GitHub pull request for an image dataset tool (https://github.com/rom1504/img2dataset/pull/218), developers made respecting these tags optional rather than default, which one commenter described as having "gutted it so that we can wash our hands of responsibility without actually respecting anyone's wishes" - Raptive Support, a company implementing these tags, admits they "are not yet an industry standard, and we cannot guarantee that any or all bots will respect them" (https://help.raptive.com/hc/en-us/articles/13764527993755-NoAI-Meta-Tag-FAQs) - A proposal to the HTML standards body (https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/9334) acknowledges these tags don't enforce consent and compliance "might not happen short of robust regulation" Some creators have become so cynical that one prominent artist David Revoy announced they're abandoning tags like #NoAI because "the damage has already been done" and they "can't remove [their] art one by one from their database." (https://www.davidrevoy.com/article977/artificial-inteligence-why-i-ll-not-hashtag-…) This raises several practical questions: - Will this actually work in practice without enforcement mechanisms? - Could it be legally enforceable down the line? - Has anyone successfully used these tags to prevent unauthorized training? Beyond the technical implementation, I think this points to a broader conversation about creator consent in the AI era. Is this more symbolic - a signal that people want some version of "AI consent" for the open web? Or could it evolve into an actual standard with teeth? I'm curious if folks here have added something like this to their own websites or content. Have you implemented any technical measures to detect if your content is being used for training anyway? And for those working in AI: what's your take on respecting these kinds of opt-out signals? Would love to hear what others think.

norms state that you can use publicly available data for data mining, especially if you are doing it as part of scientific research. Copyright holders may prohibit such activities but must do it in machine readable form on the website. First, I am not positive that Laion's activities fall under the law's definition of "data mining". The law says data mining is an activity done in order to gain insight into "patterns, trends and correlations". But Laion does not even attempt to gain any insight from the data, it just wants to provide a data set for model building [0]. I don't think § 44b UrhG is applicable at all. Second, Laion cannot simply yell "it's for research". To use of § 66d UrhG, you (a) must qualify as a research organisation, and (b) there must not be any private organisation in the background directing the research. Whether or not Laion qualifies as such would have to be decided by the courts, but I think it's questionable. Overall I think the lawyers' position as outlined in [2] is not very strong. Perhaps they find better arguments when a court is involved. -- Question 2: Under German law, does the photographer have any claim against Laion? Difficult. The photographer asked Laion to remove his work from their dataset [5]. The lawyers replied that Laion does not store any photographies so there is nothing to remove. It seems that the photographer did not understand this correctly when writing the initial cease-and-desist letter. Does Laion infringe on the photographer's copyright if they mereley distribute links? The photographer argues that Laion admittedly does download raw images themselves, which pertains to Question 1. Aside from this, in German law there is a theory called "Störerhaftung" [6]. It means that if what you are doing enables copyright infringement you may be liable as well, even if you do not distribute the content yourself. If you get notified that you participate in any such infringement by a copyright holder you must cease and desist immediately. In some cases, distributors of hyperlinks to copyrighted material have been found to commit copyright infringement, though it has been rather the exception. I have no idea how a court would decide in the current case. One may argue that simply adding the equivalent of a `robots.txt` will suffice to end the infringement, but that is too simple. The photographer sells his work to a customer who may use it on their website, but does not want anyone else to use his work. However, the photographer cannot control whether or not the customer uses a `noai` on the website. [3] is opt-out, but for this to work, the photographer must have the opportunity to opt-out. It seems the law did not sufficiently appreciate this scenario. It also seems it did not foresee instances where content mining enables AI models replicating (parts of) the content they did mine. One plausible scenario is that the court denies the photographer's claims to Laion because he can contractually mandate clients to place a `noai` tag on their website. In any case, I think the photographer would have to demonstrate how specifically Laion cost him money as there are no punitive damages in German law. [0] https://laion.ai/blog/laion-5b/ [1] https://github.com/rom1504/img2dataset [2] https://www.alltageinesfotoproduzenten.de/2023/04/24/laion-e... [3] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__44b.html [4] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__60d.html [5] https://www.alltageinesfotoproduzenten.de/2023/02/20/laion-v... [6] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/St%C3%B6rerhaftung [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_...

Tag: noimageai` and `X-Robots-Tag: noimageindex` By default img2dataset will ignore images with such headers. //Then pull up the policy link first To understand why image creators and artists may choose to specify such headers for their images, and choose to actively not consent to their images being collected, see [AI use impact](https://github.com/rom1504/img2dataset#ai-use-impact). AI training would not be possible without the contribution of artists, and it is the recommendation of this tool's authors that you should respect their communicated wishes. However, if you have a legitimate reason to bypass these headers, to disable this behavior and download all images, you may pass --disallowed_header_directives '[]' ```

o defend the robots.txt convention and nip this in the bud. If a bot doesn't make a reasonable effort to respect robots.txt and it causes disruption, it's a denial-of-service attack and should be treated as such. No excuses.

tion you provide is "here's how to use my tool unethically" rather than "here's why the default ethical use is important, though if you really have a good use case, here you go", then you're complicit in unethical use of this tool.