Inside the 1TB ImageNet data set used to train the world's AI: Nude kids, drunken frat parties, porno stars, and more

Special report ImageNet – a data set used to train AI systems around the world – contains photos of naked children, families on the beach, college parties, porn actresses, and more, scraped from the web to train computers without those individuals' explicit consent. The library consists of 14 million images, each placed into categories that describe what's pictured in each scene. This pairing of information – images and labels – is used to teach artificially intelligent applications to recognize things and people caught on camera. The database has been downloaded by boffins, engineers, and academics to train hundreds if not thousands of neural networks to identify stuff in photos – from assault rifles and aprons to magpies and minibuses to zebras and zucchinis, and everything in between. In 2012, the data set was used to build AlexNet, heralded as a breakthrough development in deep learning since it marked the first time a neural network outperformed traditional computational methods at object recognition in terms of accuracy.