Popular image generation models can be prompted to produce identifiable photos of real people, potentially threatening their privacy, according to new

AI models spit out photos of real people and copyrighted images

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2023-02-03 23:30:11

Popular image generation models can be prompted to produce identifiable photos of real people, potentially threatening their privacy, according to new research. The work also shows that these AI systems can be made to regurgitate exact copies of medical images and copyrighted work by artists. It’s a finding that could strengthen the case for artists who are currently suing AI companies for copyright violations.

The researchers, from Google, DeepMind, UC Berkeley, ETH Zürich, and Princeton, got their results by prompting Stable Diffusion and Google’s Imagen with captions for images, such as a person’s name, many times. Then they analyzed whether any of the images they generated matched original images in the model’s database. The group managed to extract over 100 replicas of images in the AI’s training set. 

These image-generating AI models are trained on vast data sets consisting of images with text descriptions that have been scraped from the internet. The latest generation of the technology works by taking images in the data set and changing one pixel at a time until the original image is nothing but a collection of random pixels. The AI model then reverses the process to make the pixelated mess into a new image. 

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