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Home/AI Incident Database/Stanford researchers find child sexual abuse material in the LAION-5B dataset used to train Stable Diffusion

Stanford researchers find child sexual abuse material in the LAION-5B dataset used to train Stable Diffusion

The Stanford Internet Observatory found known child abuse images inside the open web-scrape used to train major image generators, explaining their ability to produce CSAM and forcing dataset withdrawal and re-release.

Severity: Highlaioncsamtraining datastable diffusion

At a glance

Organisation: LAION; Stability AI; Stanford Internet Observatory
Industry: AI developers and research labs
Country or region: Global
Occurred: 1 Mar 2022
Discovered: 1 Dec 2023
Disclosed: 20 Dec 2023

All details 16

Type of harm: Child sexual abuse material, Exploitation of children
Kind of system: Training data and datasets
Severity: High
Confirmation: Demonstrated by researchers
Model: Stable Diffusion 1.5
Model provider: Stability AI / Runway
Technique: Hash matching against known CSAM databases across the scraped dataset
Primary root cause: Contaminated or poisoned training data
Scale: Over 1,000 confirmed CSAM images among 5.85 billion links
Outcome: LAION took the dataset offline and released a cleaned "Re-LAION" in 2024; Stable Diffusion 1.5 was removed from Hugging Face and Civitai; the finding underpins provisions on training-data screening.

Sources

cyber.fsi.stanford.eduhttps://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/news/investigation-finds-ai-image-generation-models-train…

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Stanford researchers find child sexual abuse material in the LAION-5B dataset used to train Stable Diffusion

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