Exploring 12 Million of the 2.3 Billion Images Used to Train Stable Diffusion’s Image Generator

Andy Baio:

One of the biggest frustrations of text-to-image generation AI models is that they feel like a black box. We know they were trained on images pulled from the web, but which ones? As an artist or photographer, an obvious question is whether your work was used to train the AI model, but this is surprisingly hard to answer. [...]

So, with the help of my friend Simon Willison, we grabbed the data for over 12 million images used to train Stable Diffusion, and used his Datasette project to make a data browser for you to explore and search it yourself. Note that this is only a small subset of the total training data: about 2% of the 600 million images used to train the most recent three checkpoints, and only 0.5% of the 2.3 billion images that it was first trained on.

★ Tuesday, 6 September 2022