WHOSE DATA IS IT, ANYWAY? AI trains on kids’ photos even when parents use strict privacy settings.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) continues to reveal how photos of real children casually posted online years ago are being used to train AI models powering image generators—even when platforms prohibit scraping and families use strict privacy settings.

Last month, HRW researcher Hye Jung Han found 170 photos of Brazilian kids that were linked in LAION-5B, a popular AI dataset built from Common Crawl snapshots of the public web. Now, she has released a second report, flagging 190 photos of children from all of Australia’s states and territories, including indigenous children who may be particularly vulnerable to harms.

It’s a serious story but you have to laugh at the last line which has a real “World to End Tomorrow — Women and Minorities Hardest Hit” vibe.