LAION
In plain wordsA mostly volunteer group, registered as a German nonprofit, that compiled free lists of billions of online pictures and their captions. Stable Diffusion and other image generators were trained on them.
The Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network, a volunteer-run association registered in Germany that aims to make the raw materials of machine learning, datasets and trained models, freely available. Its best-known products, LAION-400M (2021) and LAION-5BLAION-5B, prop. n.: A free list of nearly six billion links to online images paired with their captions, released in 2022 and used to train image generators such as Stable Diffusion. (2022), hold hundreds of millions to billions of links to web images, each paired with its alt-text caption, harvested from Common CrawlCommon Crawl, prop. n.: A nonprofit's free archive of the public web, begun in 2008 and now refreshed with snapshots of billions of pages every month or two. Most large language models learned much of what they know from text taken from it. and kept only when CLIPCLIP, prop. n.: An OpenAI model that learned to match pictures with their captions from hundreds of millions of web examples, so it can judge how well any piece of text describes any image. judged image and text to match. They became the standard open training data for text-to-image models such as Stable DiffusionStable Diffusion, prop. n.: A widely used image-generating AI whose model files were released for anyone to download, so people could run it on their own computers and adapt it. and for OpenCLIP, an open reproduction of CLIP. Because the datasets list links to web images collected without consent, they raised copyright, privacy and safety concerns: in December 2023 a Stanford Internet Observatory report found links to suspected child sexual abuse material, prompting a takedown and the cleaned Re-LAION-5B (2024). In September 2024 the Hamburg Regional Court dismissed a photographer's copyright suit, holding that building the dataset fell under Germany's scientific-research text and data mining exceptiontext and data mining exception, n.: A rule in many countries' copyright laws that lets people use computers to copy and analyze large amounts of text, images or data without asking permission — sometimes only for research, sometimes unless owners opt out.; the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court upheld the dismissal on appeal in December 2025.
Origin
Founded in 2021 by researchers and volunteers including Christoph Schuhmann, a Hamburg secondary-school teacher, and Jenia Jitsev, who coordinated through a Discord server; it is registered in Germany as a nonprofit association (eingetragener Verein).
Related
- LAION-5BLAION-5B, prop. n.: A free list of nearly six billion links to online images paired with their captions, released in 2022 and used to train image generators such as Stable Diffusion.
- Common CrawlCommon Crawl, prop. n.: A nonprofit's free archive of the public web, begun in 2008 and now refreshed with snapshots of billions of pages every month or two. Most large language models learned much of what they know from text taken from it.
- Stable DiffusionStable Diffusion, prop. n.: A widely used image-generating AI whose model files were released for anyone to download, so people could run it on their own computers and adapt it.
- CLIPCLIP, prop. n.: An OpenAI model that learned to match pictures with their captions from hundreds of millions of web examples, so it can judge how well any piece of text describes any image.
- text and data mining exceptiontext and data mining exception, n.: A rule in many countries' copyright laws that lets people use computers to copy and analyze large amounts of text, images or data without asking permission — sometimes only for research, sometimes unless owners opt out.
- Stability AIStability AI, prop. n.: A London company that paid for and released Stable Diffusion, a free image-generating AI anyone could download, and later models for video, audio and 3D.
Mentioned in
Stability AIStability AI, prop. n.: A London company that paid for and released Stable Diffusion, a free image-generating AI anyone could download, and later models for video, audio and 3D.