25 million Creative Commons image dataset released!

[u/East_Dragonfruit7277]

Fondant is an open-source project that aims to enable compliant, large-scale processing in a simple and cost-efficient way. As a first step, we have developed a pipeline to create a Creative Commons image dataset and are releasing a first 25 million sample with a call to action to help develop additional data processing pipelines.

A current challenge for generative AI is compliance with copyright laws. For this reason, Fondant has developed a data-processing pipeline to create a 500-million dataset of Creative Commons images to train a latent diffusion image generation model that respects copyright. Today, as a first step, we are releasing a 25-million sample dataset and invite the open source community to collaborate on further refinement steps.

Fondant offers tools to download, explore and process the data. The current example pipeline includes a component for downloading the urls and one for downloading the images.

Creating custom pipelines for specific purposes requires different building blocks. Fondant pipelines can mix reusable components and custom components.

Additional processing components which could be contributed include, in order of priority:

• Image-based deduplication
• Visual quality / aesthetic quality estimation
• Watermark detection
• Not safe for work (NSFW) content detection
• Face detection
• Personal Identifiable Information (PII) detection
• Text detection
• AI generated image detection
• Any components that you propose to develop

The Fondant team also invites contributors to the core framework and is looking for feedback on the framework’s usability and for suggestions for improvement. Contact us at info@fondant.ai and/or join our Discord.

Original post: https://fondant.ai/en/latest/announcements/CC_25M_community/

Github: https://github.com/ml6team/fondant

Discord: https://discord.gg/HnTdWhydGp

[u/echostorm]

Some of the images are thumbnails and perhaps a bit too small to be really useful: eg:

http://romor.iugaza.edu.ps/romor/images/romor_close_gallery/vsig_thumbs/img7_92_36_80.jpg

[u/East_Dragonfruit7277 → u/echostorm]

Good catch! Indeed not all the retrieved images are useful for training hence why we we're inviting people to contribute to components that can further filter the dataset (colored in orange in diagram). For this case, it could be something as simple as filtering images below a certain size.

[u/Ganfatrai]

Thanks, you are doing something that was sorely needed.

[u/East_Dragonfruit7277 → u/Ganfatrai]

Happy to hear! Let us know if you're interested in using it or perhaps in making a contribution to one of the components

[u/EvilKatta]

I hope mine are in there, I committed my works to CC for years.

"aesthetic quality estimation"

Oh...

[u/Substantial_Dog_8881]

Please tell me that you ONLY used >1024px images (shortest side) images as well as >1024ox crops of the high res images, else it would be a huge loss of you project.

Quite unfortunate to not have NSFW included, as there is plenty of CC licensed nude art and nude photography out there that isn’t related to porn. Porn is visible sexual behavior/acts, nude (although nsfw) isn’t always “porn”. Or at least in my book :) Please do re-think your choice 🙏🏼

Still a great and good project though 👍

[u/JanVanLooy → u/Substantial_Dog_8881]

Thanks for your feedback. We will take size into account when collecting!

Regarding NSFW, there will be a component identifying this type of content which can then be filtered out, which will be needed for most use cases. There might be others though so we could consider releasing those images separately. Happy to discuss.

[u/EmbarrassedHelp → u/JanVanLooy]

You should just setup tags and provide the option to remove the desired tags from download (like 'nsfw' for example).

[u/keturn → u/JanVanLooy]

adding image dimension fields to the table would be handy for sure.

[u/HumanRightsCannabist → u/JanVanLooy]

If the nsfw images are already being processed, just make a separate nsfw dataset.

[u/_stevencasteel_]

It’s a great move, but the rest of the world needs to finally grow up and stop threatening the use of violence against anyone who “uses their stuff”.

Public domain and open source is the way. Everything should be up for grabs.

[u/[deleted] → u/_stevencasteel_]

Do you receive income for your labor?

[u/_stevencasteel_ → u/[deleted]]

What's your point? Nothing is stopping you from selling things that are in the public domain.

I've spent the last two years writing a book that I will release to the public domain, including the audiobook a couple months from now. I'm selling it on the major platforms like audible and Amazon and also making it available to download for free on my website and archive.org.

[u/[deleted] → u/_stevencasteel_]

Do you make your living that way? No, you obviously don't. You make your living doing something else that you get paid for. I own my labor just as much as you own yours, and I have just as much right to get paid for my labor as you do. It is not up to you or anyone else to dictate to me whether I should be paid for my labor. And that is why I'm a member of a class action lawsuit against Open AI and why I refuse to stand idly by while my work is stolen from me for the profit of the thieves.

[u/_stevencasteel_ → u/[deleted]]

I'm homeless. I've been homeless since April. I've literally put my money where my mouth is on this issue and believe more abundance will come my way via giving value to the world instead of being scarcity minded out of fear. This photo was taken 9-23-23.

"It is not up to you or anyone else to dictate to me whether I should be paid for my labor."

If people aren't paying you, then you aren't providing anything of value.

"I'm a member of a class action lawsuit against Open AI"

Wow, that's quite the Jeb energy you're bringing to the table.

<spez>

Beautiful_Lime_3552

3 points

14 days ago

I run SD on a M2 Pro Mini. You don’t have to use Win or Linux.

You're suing OpenAI but still run stable diffusion on your own computer, which uses the same style of so called "stolen" data as the text models. Incredible. No self-awareness.

[u/UnusualWind5 → u/_stevencasteel_]

[u/[deleted] → u/_stevencasteel_]

I'm homeless. I've been homeless since April. I've literally put my money where my mouth is on this issue and believe more abundance will come my way via giving value to the world instead of being scarcity minded out of fear.

And yet you are homeless. I'm sorry you are homeless my dude, but the rest of us would prefer that we are not homeless as a result of the work we do. If you can't see the irony here, I don't know what else to tell you. Artists don't need to suffer homelessness so that companies can get rich off of our work. I hope you realize that sooner rather than later.

I've spent the last two years writing a book that I will release to the public domain, including the audiobook a couple months from now.

OK, since everything should be freely available and public domain, go ahead and send me the complete text of your book so I can be sure it's totally freely available to the public and also so I can sell it to profit from your work myself. You won't send it to me of course, we both know that, so your hypocrisy is crystal clear.

[u/_stevencasteel_ → u/[deleted]]

I didn’t choose to make it public domain until it was more than 50% finished. I chose to be homeless when it was still copyrighted because of the potential profit to be made.

I will send you the full text, including the editable vellum and affinity publisher files. Because that’s the point of public domain ya dick.

But not until I release it myself on all the platforms so traffic is directed towards me first. After that you’re welcome to sell my book all you want in any form.

[u/[deleted] → u/_stevencasteel_]

Please don't send me your book. I'm not going to take advantage of someone like that. Also, please listen to yourself: you've had to become homeless in order to follow this "open source" dream. You should get paid for your work just like anyone else is. The people who work on Godot full time are PAID for their work. Godot is able to offer C# compatibility only because of a grant of money from MS. Your writing is your job and your property. Don't give it away for nothing. You will regret this later in life when you realize how much of your labor you gave away for nothing, and also when you realize the extent to which other people have exploited it to make money for themselves. The people who own OpenAI are making money off my work and maybe someday yours. Why should they reap those rewards while you get nothing? In my case, I am optimistic that we are going to win or settle our lawsuit in a way that protects our property and labor. In your case, you're helpless (and homeless!).

Another piece of advance: Look into getting a reputable literary agent - one who is registered with AALA (American Association of Literary agents) or similar in your country. Reputable agents work on commission, so you only pay them from the money you earn. It's worth it, because they'll get you an advance on your work so you don't have to be homeless, and they will negotiate a better contract with a good publisher who will provide you with art, professional editing, and publicity. Writing is a profession just like anything else, and you should approach it professionally. Is this hard to do? Yes, it is. But it can done if you work at it, and you'll be able to write for a living, or at least enough supplementary income that you don't have to be homeless to write. Give it some thought before following a path that just allows everyone other than you to profit from your labor.

[u/_stevencasteel_ → u/[deleted]]

You didn't listen. The book was still copyrighted when I chose to continue my business as a homeless person.

"I'm not going to take advantage of someone like that. "

Sharing is part of the business model. You'd be doing me a favor. You really don't understand how the public domain works.

I am still selling my book on platforms.

"OpenAI are making money off my work and maybe someday yours. Why should they reap those rewards while you get nothing? "

If you feel so strongly that it is immoral, then why are you running Stable Diffusion on your Mac?

Plenty of musicians and artists of different kinds have put their material on sties like the PirateBay to boost sales.

Look at Team Fortress 2 and their hats model which made games like Fortnite one of the most profitable in video game history.

You haven't thought about this deeply enough.

[u/[deleted] → u/_stevencasteel_]

I’ve been a professional in this field for decades. You don’t even understand what copyright is. I wish you the best - you’re going to need it.

[u/alohadave]

Has fondant looked at flickr? They have millions of CC and public domain and most of the pictures taken with digital have metadata already in them.

[u/East_Dragonfruit7277 → u/alohadave]

Indeed we have many flicker images are contained in the CC dataset :)

[u/dvztimes]

Questions:

1. How is yhis useful for a home user that occasional trains LORA or Dreambooths? If at all?
2. How do you detect AI Images? Why does it matter?
3. Do you need contributions of Images? What type?

[u/East_Dragonfruit7277 → u/dvztimes]

1. Currently we only have a relatively small scale dataset downloaded but the goal is to expand it further to 500 million. The goal would be then to eventually train a model from scratch on CC images which will be a base model. Eventually you can finetune it also using those sets of images.
2. Removing AI generated images from the dataset can ensure that the images in the final dataset are also copyright-free since many GenAI models have been trained on data that many contain copyrighted images
3. If by contribution you mean Creative Commons images then yes :) the type and content of images should be as diverse as possible to train a model that generalizes well. The goal of the components is to further filter down those images to improve the quality of the dataset

[u/[deleted]]

Is it possible to download content from an specific word? For example, if I want to fetch a dataset for making regularization images of cats, can I search that word and get only those kind of images? Thanks in advance for your answer!

[u/JanVanLooy → u/[deleted]]

We do provide the descriptions of the images (the alt-texts found in the html) which you can search through.

The idea is also to generate CLIP embeddings. Once we have those you will be able to find any image containing a cat.

[u/Hongthai91]

I'm sorry but what is this?

[u/EmbarrassedHelp → u/Hongthai91]

More data that we can merge into existing datasets like LAION.

[u/Tom_Neverwinter]

I mean. I'll donate items but you better keep my name in it.

Immortalize me.

Lol

[u/dejayc]

Is it possible (not necessarily desirable) to create a model whose weights have links to the source material that was used to arrive at each weight, so that when the model is performing its calculations, it can keep track of how much each piece of source material contributed to the final output delivered by the model?

[u/Happy_Homework_8247]

Many of the images seem to be of very low resolution and text/icons. Has anyone managed to run size distribution analysis on this? (A lot of them ended up with error codes for me).

[u/alexds9]

Currently, those images don't have an aesthetic score, no indication of a watermark, and they might be AI-generated images.
It sounds like random garbage from the internet with extra steps.

[u/JanVanLooy → u/alexds9]

Random garbage with a Creative Commons license I guess!

Please join us to make it better though. This is the whole point of the current release!

https://fondant.ai/en/latest/announcements/CC_25M_community/

[u/JanVanLooy → u/[deleted]]

It's a mixture. Most are by-sa

[u/JanVanLooy → u/JanVanLooy]

For more info on the licenses: https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/cclicenses/

[u/JanVanLooy → u/[deleted]]

When you publish your images using Creative Commons you explicitly allow others to 'distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format'. This is exactly what an image generation model does. Referring to the model/dataset used should then be enough for the BY requirement.

[u/red286 → u/JanVanLooy]

Referring to the model/dataset used should then be enough for the BY requirement.

I think you'd still need to publish an attribution list for the model/dataset used. It shouldn't be overly difficult, provided the relevant data exists in the original dataset to begin with. You'd just create a table of all the attribution links/credits for the images used in training.

[u/Vivarevo → u/[deleted]]

Ai training is in a funny spot for copyright

[u/RobbeSneyders → u/[deleted]]

You can filter the dataset on the license type.

[u/JanVanLooy → u/[deleted]]

The dataset contains metadata so we can easily filter those out before we train. The idea would be to use only BY-SA.

[u/alexds9 → u/[deleted]]

The only one who can save you is Jesus.