“These were mostly family photos uploaded to personal and parenting blogs […] as well as stills from YouTube videos"
So… people posted photos of their kids on public websites, common crawl scraped them, LAION-5B cleaned it up for training, and now there are models. This doesn’t seem evil to me… digital commons working as intended.
If anyone is surprised, the fault lies with the UX around “private URL” sharing, not devs using Common Crawl
AI trained on photos from kids’ entire childhood without their consent ( arstechnica.com )