Found out AI art datasets include copyrighted medical scans without consent

I was digging into a study from MIT Technology Review last month and learned that over 12,000 medical scans from patients were scraped into training sets without asking anyone. Turns out some of those images are now being used to generate AI art that people are selling on Etsy. Is it even legal to profit off someone's MRI without their permission like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

mason.paige17d ago

12,000 scans sounds like a lot but that's nothing compared to how many MRIs get taken every day in the US alone. Half those images are probably just knees and spines anyway, who's really getting hurt by a picture of someone's knee being turned into a weird AI painting on Etsy.

lisa_murray17d ago

Used to be on the side of "it's just medical data, who cares" until I read that article myself last month @mason.paige. The issue isn't really about knees or spines specifically, it's that those scans were loaded into a training set without anyone's knowledge or consent for commercial use. Profiting off someone else's private medical imaging feels like a line that shouldn't be crossed just because the dataset is huge and mostly boring.