Heather Tal Murphy has written an exciting article for SLATE Magazine about Spawning, the company behind haveibeentrained.com (the website where Artists can have their images removed from LAION 5B, the database most commonly used to train AI models), and I feature in it too – in words and pictures!

“Iris Luckhaus, an illustrator based in Berlin, was one of many artists who turned to HaveIBeenTrained in December (…). She wondered whether her own illustrations had helped train Stable Diffusion, (…). Indeed, through the tool, she learned that 3,280 of them had, including early drafts of illustrations that she hadn’t realized were findable on the internet. (…) “I felt violated and terribly angry,” Luckhaus said. Just because she puts artworks online, that’s “not an invitation to just do with them as you please”—in this case, to create a tool that she is concerned will replace human artists. She refuses to use A.I. image generators because exploiting other artists makes her feel just “as dirty as buying cheap clothes made with child labor,” she said.”

“Alongside these arguments, you’ll find artists like Neil Turkewitz, a copyright activist, who praised the Spawning endeavor on Twitter while also arguing that it’s best to see it as “a step towards accountability and not the destination.” Luckhaus agrees that the realm of training sets needs regulation as well, but for now, Spawning is the only endeavor offering her a concrete way to protect her images. For that, she is grateful.”

Thank you to Heather Tal Murphy for the article – and the interesting questions! And one more, thanks to Spawning for their effort in building bridges between artists and AI, and for offering sort of a First Aid kit for artists.