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Megaface

exposing.ai

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Re: Megaface

#31

Post by sschueller »

This datasets usage and creation violates Swiss law [1]. Any person in Switzerland has the right to their face in any picture taken now and any time in the future even if taken by someone else. Without the explicit consent of a person, their face may not be used or published in anyway or form. There are only a few exceptions like for public figures and celebrities but even then they also have a right to privacy.

SRF once did a segment about face recognition and public photos from social media. Under strict supervision and journalism protection they created a data set and showed what was possible. The dataset and code was then destroyed. [2]

Similar laws exist in EU states as well.

[1] https://www.edoeb.admin.ch/edoeb/de/home/datenschutz/Interne...

[2] https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/automatische-gesichtserkennu...

Re: Megaface

#32

Post by schemescape »

sdenton4 wrote: post #26
schemescape wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone know if attempts have been made to trick these ML models into reproducing original copyrighted inputs verbatim (edit: or close enough)? Edit: Asking about verbatim copies wasn't really a great question. I should have asked about producing things that are "close enough to cause legal trouble" (whether that be due to copyright, trademark, or something else).

That's not really how memorization in neutral networks works. For classifiers, memorization is more like learning a hash function and a lookup table; no need to store the full image at all. Even for very large models, the weights are a tiny fraction of the size of the original data. It's probably helpful to think of embeddings for generative models in a similar way; it's a very specific embedding function, like a loc…

Thanks. Yes, I shouldn't have asked about "verbatim" copies -- I should have asked about something more like "close enough to cause legal trouble". Obviously copying verbatim is a violation of copyright, but there must be some threshold of "close enough" that is still problematic. E.g. compressed MP3s of copyrighted songs aren't a verbatim reproduction, but as far as I'm aware they're still covered by copyright.

Trademarks are even broader.

Re: Megaface

#33

Post by schemescape »

polygamous_bat wrote: post #27
schemescape wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone know if attempts have been made to trick these ML models into reproducing original copyrighted inputs verbatim (edit: or close enough)? Edit: Asking about verbatim copies wasn't really a great question. I should have asked about producing things that are "close enough to cause legal trouble" (whether that be due to copyright, trademark, or something else).

One, the diffusion model's possible output space contains every RGB image ever. But two, it cannot ever possibly contain the original inputs verbatim, because (the size of the model)/(the size of the training set) comes out to be something like 0.2 KB per image. Unless it's an incredible compression algorithm, diffusion necessarily have learned something from the input rather than copy-pasting things, as claimed upth…

I edited my post a while ago, but I shouldn't have ask about "verbatim" copies. See reply to sibling for a more interesting question.

Re: Megaface

#34

Post by cmeacham98 »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #17
samwillis wrote: post #8

One of the difficulties with these training datasets is the currently understood rules around web scraping. The current legal precedent [0] is that web scraping is perfectly legal, despite what is in the websites terms of service, "licence" or robots.txt. If a human can navigate to it freely, you can scrape it using automated means. What you can't do with scraped data is republish it verbatim. Doing a data analysis o…

>Or is it republishing of the original data? If it's publishing _data_ then you're fine under regular copyright as it only protects artistic works and not things like data. You might fall shy of other IP legislation but not copyright. YMMV, this is not legal advice and represents my personal opinion unrelated to my employment.

The "data" here is photographs, which all jurisdictions I'm aware of treat as coprightable.

Re: Megaface

#35

Post by fleddr »

the_duke wrote: post #15
samwillis wrote: post #8

One of the difficulties with these training datasets is the currently understood rules around web scraping. The current legal precedent [0] is that web scraping is perfectly legal, despite what is in the websites terms of service, "licence" or robots.txt. If a human can navigate to it freely, you can scrape it using automated means. What you can't do with scraped data is republish it verbatim. Doing a data analysis o…

It's not as easy as that. Pictures are clearly personally identifiable data, so storing them violates the GDPR if you don't have permission to do so. Some "data analysis company" got fined a hefty sum for doing so with EU citizens. I forgot the name, but they were recently in the news for helping Ukraine identify Russian soldiers by picture. Of course they were also aggregating other data including names, so just pic…

"Pictures are clearly personally identifiable data, so storing them violates the GDPR if you don't have permission to do so."

Wouldn't a Creative Commons license express this permission?

Re: Megaface

#36

Post by sacrosancty »

gardenhedge wrote: post #7

It strikes me as sad that people's photos have been taken a used to train a technology for a corporate profit. People just wanted to share their wedding photos.

Replace "corporate profit" with "social good", which is what it generally comes from, and then is it still sad?

You seem to imply there's something wrong with corporate profit. We as society want and encourage corporate profit because we want the social good that corporations provide and the profit incentivizes them to do it. Profit is a rough measure of how much good they do for people.

Profit is like salary for investors. Salary is fine for doctors and teachers, isn't it? It's also fine for investors which do the useful and difficult job of deciding which companies are doing the most good, then encouraging them to do more of it by investing money.

Re: Megaface

#37

Post by EMIRELADERO »

satvikpendem wrote: post #24
samwillis wrote: post #8

One of the difficulties with these training datasets is the currently understood rules around web scraping. The current legal precedent [0] is that web scraping is perfectly legal, despite what is in the websites terms of service, "licence" or robots.txt. If a human can navigate to it freely, you can scrape it using automated means. What you can't do with scraped data is republish it verbatim. Doing a data analysis o…

There was an updated ruling in November 2022 showing that HiQ was ruled against and that they reached a settlement with LinkedIn, so I'm not sure that web scraping is entirely legal. https://www.natlawreview.com/article/hiq-and-linkedin-reach-...

That was because Linkedin added a no-scraping clause to their ToS and also put up a login wall for viewing profiles in the first place.

If you scraped from a web page without actually signing up for an account you wouldn't be accepting the terms and would thus be legally in the clear.

Re: Megaface

#38

Post by [deleted] »

ironmagma wrote: post #13
gardenhedge wrote: post #7

It strikes me as sad that people's photos have been taken a used to train a technology for a corporate profit. People just wanted to share their wedding photos.

It's no worry, someday that data will be so ubiquitous and well-studied that it won't even be profitable, it will just be trivial to construct or deconstruct any face.

[deleted]

Re: Megaface

#39

Post by fleddr »

gardenhedge wrote: post #7

It strikes me as sad that people's photos have been taken a used to train a technology for a corporate profit. People just wanted to share their wedding photos.

I agree, but why would one share wedding photos using an open license like Creative Commons?

Re: Megaface

#40

Post by [deleted] »

traceroute66 wrote: post #21
KRAKRISMOTT wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do the scraping in a jurisdiction where it is legal.

> You can do the scraping in a jurisdiction where it is legal. No such thing with GDPR. Why do you think so many US websites take the lazy-ass approach and block EU visitors to their websites ? Simple, its because either you comply with GDPR or you don't process the information of citizens of GDPR covered countries. End of story.

[deleted]
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