--- title: "Woman Horrified To Discover Her Private Medical Photos Were Being Used To Train AI" description: "An AI artist unexpectedly discovered that private medical photos from over ten years ago were included in the AI training image database LAION." date: "2022-09-23" modified: "2022-09-23" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/the-byte/private-medical-photos-ai" categories: - "Health & Medicine" - "Medical" tags: - "ai" - "ai art" - "artificial inteligence" - "the digest" --- # Woman Horrified To Discover Her Private Medical Photos Were Being Used To Train AI ![An AI artist unexpectedly discovered that private medical photos from over ten years ago were included in the AI training image database LAION.]() *\Image: Futurism\* ## Doctor Botto An AI artist going by the name Lapine says she discovered that private medical photos from nearly ten years ago were being used in an image set that trains AI, called LAION-5B. Lapine made this unnerving discovery by using [Have I Been Trained](), a site that lets artists to check if their work has been used in the image set. When Lapine performed a reverse image search of her face, two of her private medical photos unexpectedly cropped up. "In 2013 a doctor photographed my face as part of clinical documentation," Lapine explained [on Twitter](). "He died in 2018 and somehow that image ended up somewhere online and then ended up in the data set — the image that I signed a consent form for my doctor — not for a data set." ## Chain of Custody LAION-5B is supposed to only use publicly available images on the web. And by all ethical and reasonable accounts, you’d think that would mean private photos of medical patients would be excluded. Apparently not. Somehow, those photos were taken from her doctor’s files and ended up online, and eventually, in LAION’s image set. *Ars Technica,* [following up]() on Lapine's discovery, found plenty more "potentially sensitive" images of patients in hospitals. LAION gathered those images using web scraping, a process where bots scour the internet for content — and who knows what they might dredge up. A LAION engineer said in the organization's public Discord that the database doesn’t actually host the images, so the best way to remove one is "to ask for the hosting website to stop hosting it," as quoted by *Ars*. But as Lapine points out, that process often requires you to divulge personal information to the site in question. In the end, accountability might be tricky to pin down. Did the hospital or doctor mess up by not properly securing the photos, or are web scrapers like LAION too invasive? That may be a false dichotomy, as the answers aren’t mutually exclusive. Regardless, it’s bad enough that AIs are assimilating artists' works without their consent. But allowing private medical photos to be looked at by AI? That should be ringing everyone's alarm bells. If even those aren't sacrosanct, what is? **Read more:** *[Artist finds private medical record photos in popular AI training data set]()* **More on AI:** *[Experts Horrified by Facial Recognition Site That Digs Up "Potentially Explicit" Photos of Children]()* ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()