Considering the current advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have led to the creation of image generation systems capable of producing high-resolution images from nothing but natural language prompts. In a new study, a team of computer scientists from Google, DeepMind, ETH Zurich, Princeton University, and the University of California, Berkeley found that such systems can sometimes generate copies of images used to train them.
The team tested several image-generation software systems, including Stable Diffusion, Imagen, and Dall-E 2. Their findings, published on the arXiv preprint server, suggest that some AI-based image generation systems can generate copies of the data used to train them.
The researchers tested the systems on a wide range of images and were prompted to study the degree to which the systems reproduced the trainer data. They found that while the systems could generate high-resolution images, they could also generate copies of the trainer data, albeit with varying degrees of accuracy.
The researchers highlighted several key findings from the tests, such as that the AI-based image generation systems could capture the overall content of the images used to train them and small details that weren’t present in the original images. They noted, however, that the quality of the generated images varied depending on the complexity of the prompt used to generate them.
The team concluded that while AI-based image generation systems can produce high-quality images, they can also be susceptible to “overfitting” – reproducing the exact same images used to train them. This could lead to problems in the long run, as these systems may be unable to generalize and produce meaningful images from new data.
The team’s findings suggest that further research is needed to understand better the potential implications of using AI-based image generation systems for various applications. In particular, it will be important to study how such systems can generate meaningful, novel images without compromising image quality.