HACKER Q&A
📣 TakakiTohno

What are the laws around collecting images in the wild to build AI?


I've been wondering this for awhile now and can't find any information about it online. What are the laws (if any) put in place regarding image collection to train AI (commercial and non-commercial purposes)?

For example, let's say I wanted to train a computer vision model to recognize scenes (let's say for a real estate use case). Can I simply go to 100 restaurants, snap a photo, blur out the logo and use those images to train my model?

Can I do the same thing for electronics if I wanted to built an object recognition model?

  👤 cjbprime Accepted Answer ✓
Not a lawyer, but the AI training part doesn't seem relevant to this question. You can already take photos of restaurants and electronics, and after doing so you can use the photos because you took them and you're therefore the copyright holder. (Unless the restaurant made you sign something promising not to use photographs you take as a condition of entry, which has started to happen now with some museums and galleries, but not restaurants.)