Spawning.ai announces to have collected opt-out requests for 80 million artworks.

According to the announcement, 40,000+ individual artworks have been opted out from use for ML training via the haveibeentrained.com tool. The remaining 79 million+ opt-outs were registered through partnerships with platforms (such as ArtStation) and large rightholders (such as Shutterstock).

These opt-outs are for images included in the LAION 5B dataset used to train the Stable Diffusion text-to-image model. Stability AI has announced that the opt-outs collected by spawning.ai and made available via an API will be respected in the upcoming training of Stable Diffusion V3.

As we have previously argued, such opt-outs are supported by the EU’s legal framework for machine learning, which allows rights holders to reserve the right to text and data mining carried out for all purposes except academic research undertaken by academic reserach institutions. Spawning.ai is the first large-scale initiative to leverage this framework to offer creators and other rights holders the ability to exclude their works from being used for machine learning training.