Photobucket
Photobucket isn’t the only company using your photos for AI training
If the idea of stuff you posted to the internet long ago now being used for AI training gives you the ick, well, I have some bad news for you.
Meta recently said that it used public Facebook photos and posts to train its own AI models. Flickr photos were already used for facial recognition training starting in 2014 when Yahoo owned it. OpenAI has reportedly used YouTube content for training.
Oodles of other websites and content have been used for AI training as part of the open-source dataset called the “Common Crawl.” This could have already included Photobucket images hosted on other sites.
Leonard said Photobucket is in talks with several companies to license the images. Rather than a one-shot deal where, say, OpenAI gets images to use forever, the potential deals are generally for a few years and for specific content.
“A company will come to us and say, ‘We need content of landscapes with people in a distance, and we’re looking for beach and mountains,'” Leonard explained. “So we say, ‘OK, great. Based on that request, we have 150,000 images that we can license you.'”
Photobucket estimates about half of its 13 billion images are public and eligible for AI licensing.
Notifying users about the new Terms of Service
Leonard said Photobucket sent an email in July to its customers alerting them to an update to its Terms of Service. The update outlined how public images may be used for AI training, including “scanning and processing of the Public User Uploaded Content, including extracting physical features, e.g. measurements, of your Biometric Information (e.g., face, iris, etc.), for the purpose of artificial intelligence and machine learning training.”
I have an old Photobucket account from around 2007 that I used for hosting images for an old blog. For the past few years, I’ve gotten emails with increasingly dire warnings that my account was at risk of being deactivated. (It hasn’t been.) At some point years ago, I had already downloaded the images and stored them elsewhere, so I wasn’t too concerned. (I do continue to pay $10 a month for my old personal photos on Flickr.)
Presumably, there are plenty of people like me with an old Photobucket account, largely forgotten — maybe abandoned because we moved the photos somewhere else or simply didn’t care. And then there’s another group of people who aren’t even getting these emails: Maybe they signed up with a student email that they can’t access anymore, or maybe they long ago forgot their username and password combination.
Leonard said Photobucket has been attempting to reach customers through email, on-site alerts, and other methods (including alerting users in the press, like in this story).
I did receive the email from Photobucket alerting me about the new policy, but like most other emails about updated Terms of Service, I simply didn’t bother opening it.
“There’s kind of a two-way street where if you put a whole bunch of personal memories on the site, maybe you should do your best to continue to update the email address and everything like that,” Leonard said.