Biometrics researchers have been struggling with how to train algorithms to recognize children, particularly as they age, for instance for investigations of child sexual abuse material, and have turned to synthetic data to avoid potential harm to real data subjects.

The images of the children were collected without the knowledge or consent of their families and used to build the Laion-5B dataset, according to findings from human rights organization Human Rights Watch (HRW). The photos were then used by popular generative AI services such as Stability AI and Midjourney, The Guardian reports.