It's hard to tell if you're splitting hairs over language purposefully, but it's clear from the context that the use of the term 'private' here means 'intended to be private / legally required to be private / accidentally public'.
If it were just the click-baity headline I wouldn't be bothered (as much), but the article repeatedly refers to these public images as being private
> "Late last week, a California-based AI artist who goes by the name Lapine discovered private medical record photos taken by her doctor in 2013 referenced in the LAION-5B image set"
> "...it bothers her that private medical images have been baked into a product without any form of consent or recourse to remove them."
> "Ultimately, Lapine understands how the chain of custody over her private images failed"
The article keeps claiming that private photos are included in a AI product, but the fact is that these were public photos when they entered the product. In fact, it's only because they were public that they were included.
The article attempts to frame this situation as "LAION steals private photos and won't take responsibility" but that's not only a lie, it ignores the real issue. If there is a problem here it is that these photos were made public in the first place when they shouldn't have been, at least according to the person photographed. It's entirely unclear what rights she has to these photos or to control how or where they are used, or that there was any illegal activity from any party in making those images freely available to the public.
Even if the LAION data set never existed it wouldn't change the fact that those images have been made public and have been being repeatedly copied/shared/viewed by all manner of people for any number of purposes. Calling out this one AI project is ridiculous. There are some good discussions to be had about if it's okay to use certain types of material in training datasets, but it doesn't help anyone to grossly misrepresent the issue.
I feel bad for people who suddenly realize that images of them are public when they didn't think that would happen, but there is notably zero information in this article about what exactly caused these images to get posted to public websites, who published them making the images public, and what rights the publishing party had when they did it.
Discussions on how to keep data that should be private from being made public, or making people aware that data they expect should be private may not be private at all is a lot more productive than hit pieces trying to help claw back images that have already been made public or spreading FUD about new and powerful technologies that only make use of already public data.
