Enlarge / An image of the “Have I Been Trained?” website featuring a search for one of its creators, Holly Herndon. (credit: Holly Herndon)
In response to controversy over image synthesis models learning from artists’ images scraped from the Internet without consent—and potentially replicating their artistic styles—a group of artists has released a new website that allows anyone to see if their artwork has been used to train AI.
The website “Have I Been Trained?” taps into the LAION-5B training data used to train Stable Diffusion and Google’s Imagen AI models, among others. To build LAION-5B, bots directed by a group of AI researchers crawled billions of websites, including large repositories of artwork at DeviantArt, ArtStation, Pinterest, Getty Images, and more. Along the way, LAION collected millions of images from artists and copyright holders without consultation, which irritated some artists.
When visiting the Have I Been Trained? website, which is run by a group of artists called Spawning, users can search the data set by text (such as an artist’s name) or by an image they upload. They will see image results alongside caption data linked to each image. It is similar to an earlier LAION-5B search tool created by Romain Beaumont and a recent effort by Andy Baio and Simon Willison, but with a slick interface and the ability to do a reverse image search.
