The blood diamond effect in neural art: On ethically troublesome images of the imagenet dataset

Anonymous

Abstract: The main goal of this short paper is to inform the neural art community at large on the ethical ramifications of using models trained on the imagenet dataset, or using seed images from classes 445 -n02892767- [’bikini, two-piece’] and 459- n02837789- [’brassiere, bra, bandeau’] of the same. We discovered that many of the images belong to these classes were verifiably pornographic, shot in a non-consensual setting, voyeuristic and also entailed underage nudity. Akin to the \textit{ivory carving-illegal poaching} and \textit{diamond jewelry art-blood diamond} nexuses, we posit there is a similar moral conundrum at play here and would like to instigate a conversation amongst the neural artists in the community.

Keywords: Ethics, Machine learning, Computer Vision, Datasets

TL;DR: There's non-consensual and pornographic images in the ImageNet dataset