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ve to sidebar hide Navigation Main page Contents Current events Random article About Wikipedia Contact us Contribute Help Learn to edit Community portal Recent changes Upload file Special pages Search Search Appearance Donate Create account Log in Personal tools Donate Create account Log in Contents move to sidebar hide (Top) 1 Image datasets Toggle Image datasets subsection 1.1 Criticism 2 OpenAssistant 3 See also 4 References Toggle the table of contents LAION 10 languages Boarisch Català Español Français עברית Bahasa Indonesia 日本語 한국어 Русский ไทย Edit links Article Talk English Read Edit View history Tools Tools move to sidebar hide Actions Read Edit View history General What links here Related changes Upload file Permanent link Page information Cite this page Get shortened URL Print/export Download as PDF Printable version In other projects Wikimedia Commons Wikidata item Appearance move to sidebar hide From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Non-profit German artificial intelligence organization LAION Type Non-profit Industry Artificial intelligence Founder Christoph Schuhmann Jenia Jitsev Richard Vencu Robert Kaczmarczyk Theo Coombes Mehdi Cherti Aarush Katta Jan Ebert Website laion .ai   LAION (acronym for Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network ) is a German non-profit organization which makes open-sourced artificial intelligence models and datasets. [ 1 ] It is best known for releasing a number of large datasets of images and captions scraped from the web which have been used to train a number of high-profile text-to-image models , including Stable Diffusion and Imagen . [ 2 ] [ 3 ] In February 2023, LAION was named in the Getty Images lawsuit against Stable Diffusion as a non-party. [ 4 ] In April 2023, LAION was directly sued by a German photographer who wanted to have his images removed from the training set. [ 5 ] In September 2024, the Regional Court of Hamburg dismissed the lawsuit, in what was described as a "landmark ruling on TDM [ Text and data mining ] exceptions for AI training data" in Germany and the EU more generally. [ 6 ] On April 15, 2023, LAION and contributors publicly released an open source AI assistant chatbot called OpenAssistant . Image datasets [ edit ] LAION has publicly released a number of large datasets of image-caption pairs which have been widely used by AI researchers. [ citation needed ] The data is derived from the Common Crawl , a dataset of scraped web pages. The developers searched the crawled html for <img> tags and treated their alt attributes as captions. They used CLIP to identify and discard images whose content did not appear to match their captions. [ 7 ] LAION does not host the content of scraped images themselves; rather, the dataset contains URLs pointing to images, which researchers must download themselves. [ 8 ] The first such dataset, LAION-400M, was released in August 2021 and consisted of 400 million image-caption pairs. The pairs were extracted from a random subset of webpages scraped by Common Crawl between 2014 and 2021. [ 9 ] It was an attempt to recreate the process used by OpenAI to collect the 400 million image-caption pairs they used to train the CLIP model - the company had chosen to open-source the model's code and weights, but not its training dataset. [ 7 ] Imagen , a text-to-image model announced by Google Brain in 2022, was trained on LAION-400M in combination with private internal datasets. [ 10 ] A successor of more than 5 billion pairs, LAION-5B, was released in March 2022. [ 11 ] As of its release, it was the largest freely available dataset of image-caption pairs in existence. [ 7 ] Its creation was funded by Doodlebot, Hugging Face and Stability AI , the AI company behind the funding of the Stable Diffusion text-to-image model, which was trained on it. [ 12 ] Criticism [ edit ] Several studies show that the images in LAION-5B contain problematic images and text pairs of rape, pornography, malign stereotypes, racist and ethnic slurs, and other extremely problematic content. [ 13 ] [ 14 ] An investigation by Bayerischer Rundfunk showed that LAION's datasets, hosted on Hugging Face, contain large amounts of private and sensitive data harvested from public websites. [ 15 ] In December 2023, the Stanford Internet Observatory released a report on LAION-5B that found 3,226 suspected instances of links to child sexual abuse material with 1,008 of these being externally validated. In response, LAION temporarily removed LAION-5B and LAION-400M citing its "zero tolerance policy for illegal content" and "an abundance of caution". [ 16 ] In August 2024, LAION released a cleaned dataset called Re-LAION-5B. [ 17 ] OpenAssistant [ edit ] OpenAssistant Screenshot of the data collection web portal Developers LAION and contributors Release 15 April 2023 &#59; 3 years ago  ( 2023-04-15 ) Type Large Language Model Generative pre-trained transformer Chatbot License Apache License 2.0 Website open-assistant .io OpenAssistant was an artificial intelligence (AI) open source chat-based assistant that could understand tasks, interact with third-party systems and retrieve information dynamically to do so. The project was developed by a group of volunteers in collaboration with LAION. One of the goals for development included free access to large language models that can be run locally on consumer hardware. [ 18 ] [ 19 ] The project was backed by a worldwide crowdsourcing effort involving over 13,500 volunteers who have created 600k human-generated data points. [ 19 ] [ 20 ] The project has since been shut down; however, the datasets and models remain available on Hugging Face . See also [ edit ] Artificial intelligence and copyright References [ edit ] ^ "About" . LAION.ai . Retrieved 26 September 2022 . ^ Edwards, Benj (15 September 2022). "Have AI image generators assimilated your art? New tool lets you check" . Ars Technica . ^ Newman, Marissa; Cantrill, Aggi (24 April 2023). "The Future of AI Relies on a High School Teacher's Free Database" . Bloomberg News . Retrieved 24 April 2023 . ^ "Getty Images (US), Inc. v. Stability AI, Inc., 1:23-cv-00135" . CourtListener . Retrieved 2023-02-08 . ^ "A Photographer Tried to Get His Photos Removed from an AI Dataset. He Got an Invoice Instead" . Vice . 28 April 2023 . Retrieved 2023-05-04 . ^ Goldstein, Paul ; Stuetzle, Christiane; Bischoff, Susan (2024-11-13). "Kneschke vs. LAION - Landmark Ruling on TDM exceptions for AI training data – Part 1" . Kluwer Copyright Blog . Retrieved 2024-11-25 . ^ a b c Alford, Anthony (17 May 2022). "LAION Releases Five Billion Image-Text Pair Dataset LAION-5B" . InfoQ . ^ Edwards, Benj (21 September 2022). "Artist finds private medical record photos in popular AI training data set" . Ars Technica . ^ Schuhmann, Christoph (8 August 2021). "LAION-400-Million Open Dataset" . LAION blog . Retrieved 26 September 2022 . ^ Saharia, Chitwan; Chan, William; Saxena, Saurabh; Li, Lala; Whang, Jay; Denton, Emily; Kamyar Seyed Ghasemipour, Seyed; Karagol Ayan, Burcu; Sara Mahdavi, S.; Gontijo Lopes, Rapha; Salimans, Tim; Ho, Jonathan; J Fleet, David; Norouzi, Mohammad (23 May 2022). "Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding". arXiv : 2205.11487 [ cs.CV ]. ^ Beaumont, Romain (3 March 2022). "LAION-5B: A New Era of Open Large-Scale Multi-Modal Datasets" . LAION blog . ^ Wiggers, Kyle (12 August 2022). "This startup is setting a DALL-E 2-like AI free, consequences be damned" . TechCrunch . ^ Birhane, Abeba; Prabhu, Vinay Uday; Kahembwe, Emmanuel (2021). "Multimodal datasets: misogyny, pornography, and malignant stereotypes". arXiv : 2110.01963 . {{ cite journal }} : Cite journal requires |journal= ( help ) ^ Birhane, Abeba; Prabhu, Vinay; Han, Sang; Boddeti, Vishnu Naresh; Luccioni, Alexandra Sasha (2023-11-06), Into the LAIONs Den: Investigating Hate in Multimodal Datasets , arXiv : 2311.03449 ^ Brunner, Katharina; Harlan, Elisa (2023-06-07). "We Are All Raw Material for AI" . Bayerischer Rundfunk . ^ Cole, Samantha (20 December 2023). "Largest Dataset Powering AI Images Removed After Discovery of Child Sexual Abuse Material" . 404 Media . Retrieved 22 December 2023 . ^ Belanger, Ashley (2024-08-30). "Nonprofit scrubs illegal content from controversial AI training dataset" . Ars Technica . Retrieved 2024-08-31 . ^ Open-Assistant , LAION AI, 2023-03-09 , retrieved 2023-03-09 ^ a b Köpf, Andreas; Kilcher, Yannic; von Rütte, Dimitri; Anagnostidis, Sotiris; Tam, Zhi-Rui; Stevens, Keith; Barhoum, Abdullah; Duc, Nguyen Minh; Stanley, Oliver; Nagyfi, Richárd; ES, Shahul; Suri, Sameer; Glushkov, David; Dantuluri, Arnav; Maguire, Andrew (2023-04-14). "OpenAssistant Conversations -- Democratizing Large Language Model Alignment". arXiv : 2304.07327 [ cs.CL ]. ^ "Open Assistant: Explore the Possibilities of Open and Collaborative Chatbot Development" . KDnuggets . Retrieved 2023-05-05 . [ permanent dead link ] Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=LAION&oldid=1356776941 " Categories : Applications of artificial intelligence Open-source artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence laboratories Non-profit organisations based in Germany Hidden categories: CS1 errors: missing periodical All articles with dead external links Articles with dead external links from July 2025 Articles with permanently dead external links Articles with short description Short description is different from Wikidata All articles with unsourced statements Articles with unsourced statements from June 2025 This page was last edited on 29 May 2026, at 19:21  (UTC) . Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License ; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy . Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. , a non-profit organization. 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