Photos of Australian children used in dataset to train AI, human rights group says

Human Rights Watch found links to 190 photos of kids that were scraped off internet without families' consent

• Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates
• Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast

Photos of Australian children have been included in the dataset used by several AI image-generating tools without the knowledge or consent of them or their families, research by Human Rights Watch (HRW) has found.

An analysis of less than 0.0001% of the 5.85bn images contained in the Laion-5B dataset, used by services such as Stable Diffusion creator Stability AI and Midjourney, found 190 photos of Australian children scraped from the internet.

Sign up for Guardian Australia's free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup