A Photographer Tried to Get His Photos Removed from an AI Dataset. He Got an Invoice Instead.

Robert Kneschke, a German photographer specialising in stock photography, recently became aware of hundreds of his works being used as a means to train Artificial Intelligences. Through the website "Have I Been Trained?", in fact, the artist was able to find out more about the situation and discovered that many of his works are included in the LAION-5B dataset. The dataset in question is used by various AI services, and especially by the famous Stable Diffusion software. 

Kneschke therefore decided to contact those responsible, receiving in response a $979 invoice and a statement from the company's law firm. "Our client only maintains a database that contains links to image files that are publicly available on the Internet. [...] However, since our client does not keep any of the photographs you complain about, you are not entitled to deletion."