Yes, AI models are commonly trained on images from the internet
, but this practice is a source of significant legal, ethical, and privacy controversy. While tech companies argue that using publicly available images is transformative and falls under "fair use," many artists, photographers, and other creators disagree and have filed lawsuits. The process of using online images
- Data scraping: AI companies use automated tools, or "scrapers," to collect vast quantities of images and associated text from the web. This includes social media platforms, blogs, stock photo websites, and image-hosting sites.
- Dataset creation: The collected images and their metadata (tags, captions) are used to build massive training datasets, such as the LAION-5B set, which contains billions of images.
- Model training: AI systems analyze these datasets to learn patterns and relationships between images and their descriptions. This process teaches the AI to generate new images based on text prompts.
