Opt-in & Opt-out Talk about #AIart and Have I Been Trained website

 Nothing brings the finer points of a debate into the spotlight than personal involvement.

The big AIart news of the last few days is that Stable AI will allow artist to opt out of being included in the next dataset being used to train the neural network to be used for Stable Diffusion 3. Well at least you can opt-out for the next couple of weeks, so follow this up now. 

There is a site, that can check whether you have been included in the massive Laion-5B & Laion-400m neural networks used in Stable Diffusion & Google's Imogen, yes they were trained on 5.8 billion images. I haven't established its legitimacy as an ethical stance, but it does seem legit. It doesn't appear to be a sneaky way to get more images (with so much hacking and phising establishing trust is a big issue in the #AIart discussions)

https://haveibeentrained.com/ 

However, when you see you are one of the artist whose images have been used to train the Lioan Neural Network and had no idea they are in there, some things suddenly confront you.

It took me very little time using the image search feature, to find two of my works. They were part of my Retracing Darwin exhibition in early 2010 and very early examples of my personal technique I call photoimpression. I actually don't mind if others study my method and even create examples of their own. I would like them to acknowledge me, which is becoming a hollow wish on today's web. I don't blame redbubble either, I am sure they didn't know and/or had not given permission either,

I really don't want my work, especially my own special techniques, style, mark-making colouring or composition used without my permission. This is the stuff that makes my work original. Firstly because I know I'll never be acknowledged, that others could profit from this work or contribution to this work to what is presented as their original, I also actually find a lot of the so-called art generated by these AI's a bit scary and I don't approve, and finally I find the whole process a bit morally questionable and not ethical.

So I've made up my mind, Now I do want to opt out.

Now I have to find out how? 

Damn! I have to do it image by image. Cest La Vie