New Website Tells You If Your Images Have Been Fed To Art-Generating AI

There’s a compounded fear over the new wave of artificially-intelligent art generators like DALL-E, Midjourney, Google’s Imagen, and Stable Diffusion. These text-to-image tools are shortcuts enabling anyone to identify as an artist in one click, instead of years. Going even deeper, the machines are all trained on existing work, which means everything they spit out is the result of art that was created by a human.

Over the past months, artists haven’t been able to do much besides suspect an AI-created work is a generative offspring of their own. A new website seeks to bring some answers. Created by an artist collective called Spawning, Have I Been Trained? is a search engine that lets you know if your photo or artwork is one of 5.85 billion original pieces in the LAION-5B dataset used to train Stable Diffusion and Google’s Imagen.

Introducing @spawning_ , building tools for artists to own and manage their AI training data ♥️

Artists can see if you feature in popular AI models at https://t.co/1Mh9vElQhA, and sign up to use our tools to opt-in or opt-out of AI training

I am here for questions, and excited! https://t.co/vHKtlZAgKz pic.twitter.com/OuuZJznB4q

— Holly Herndon (@hollyherndon) September 14, 2022

To use this tool, creators will only need to enter keywords into the search bar, or upload their work. If there’s a match, they can even opt-in or opt-out to have their work be part of the model via this website.

The more positive side of the site is that digital artists can leverage on the program to learn how to finetune their prompts.

LAION-5B culls art and photo banks like Flickr, DeviantArt, ArtStation, Pinterest, and Getty Images—so if you have uploaded anything on those platforms, it’s plausible your work has been used to inspire some of Stable Diffusion and Imagen’s results. Often, consent isn’t made as scraping internet data is legal.

Many of the images used are attached with metadata like alt text and captions, making it much faster for bots to learn natural language.

Oftentimes, an AI remix of an original illustration is unsolicited. As such, Spawning hopes to build more tools for artists to “own and manage their AI training data” and reclaim their power from the machine. You can check out Have I Been Trained? here.

Real photo by me from 2005 https://t.co/pZqNQXJVle and 3 DALL-E generations for the prompt "Astonishingly splendid gingerbread house created by Copenhagen Bakery & photographed by Flickr user Peter Kaminski", which is one of the labels for the photo in https://t.co/2s8wAYeP34 pic.twitter.com/r9cMG4K6Sa

— Pxth (@pixelthesia) September 17, 2022

[via PetaPixel and Ars Technica, images via various sources]