The Secret Sauce of AI: Uncovering the Provenance of Multimodal Data

This paper looks at the huge amount of data that is used to train AI models. The researchers investigated a large number of datasets, which are like giant collections of information, that are used to teach AI how to understand text, speech, and video. They found that a lot of this data comes from websites like YouTube and books, which can sometimes have problems with copyright and permissions, meaning it might not be okay to use them for commercial purposes. This is kind of like using a picture from the internet for your school project without asking the person who took the picture! The paper also shows that AI is increasingly being trained on data that is made by other AI, which could lead to new challenges in the future.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.17847