That old Photobucket account you haven’t touched in years could soon be licensed to train AI

Getty Images; Photobucket; Chelsea Jia Feng/BI

Photobucket was popular in the early days of the social internet. You might still have an account.Its CEO told BI that Photobucket could soon license photos stored on its service to train AI.Photobucket is in talks with AI companies but hasn’t yet signed a contract, its CEO says.

Photobucket, the photo-storage site once owned by Myspace, is planning to license user photos to AI companies, which would use the images to train their datasets.

CEO Ted Leonard said photos marked “private” would not be licensed. In an interview with Business Insider, he said no images have been used for AI training so far, but ones set to “public” would be part of any potential licensing deals.

If you have an old Photobucket account you haven’t touched in a while, you’ll need to reactivate it to opt out of any licensing deals by setting your account to “private.” A paid account starts at $5 a month. (You can delete your entire account for free — but you won’t be able to view or download any old photos before you do.)

Founded in 2003, Photobucket became a popular way to store the images you’d post on your friends’ Myspace walls. After a brief stint owned by News Corp, it’s been operating independently since 2009. Leonard, CEO since 2017, spoke to Business Insider about Photobucket’s latest plans, which include new features, such as a private sharing plan called Group Buckets, which allows groups like a wedding party, kids’ soccer team, or a family to post and share photos securely among themselves.

Photobucket, now privately owned and based in Denver, didn’t share details about its revenue or other financials. Leonard said he’s optimistic about AI.

“I view licensing content specifically for AI training as similar to the advertising revenue the company generated 10 years ago,” Leonard said. “It is a vehicle for continuing to support the company from a financial perspective, and it gives us capital at what we think will be fairly significant in material margins to continue investing in the product itself.”

Sitting on a possible AI-training goldmine

Unlike other mid-2000s photo-hosting peers like Flickr or Webshots, Photobucket hasn’t deleted people’s old photos. (Webshots shut down in 2012. Flickr moved to a paid subscription model in 2019 and only kept the first 1,000 images on non-paying users’ accounts.)

Those old images that Photobucket has been storing for all these years — things people uploaded in 2005 and forgot about — are still there. And now they may provide a windfall for Photobucket, which can make licensing deals with AI companies to train their models on those images and videos. Leonard didn’t share details on how much revenue the AI training deals might bring.

If those deals are inked, Photobucket would follow in the footsteps of other media and content companies that see AI licensing deals as a good financial opportunity.

Photobucket CEO Ted Leonard says his company is planning to license the service’s public photos to AI companies.

Photobucket

Photobucket isn’t the only company using your photos for AI training

If the idea of stuff you posted to the internet long ago now being used for AI training gives you the ick, well, I have some bad news for you.

Meta recently said that it used public Facebook photos and posts to train its own AI models. Flickr photos were already used for facial recognition training starting in 2014 when Yahoo owned it. OpenAI has reportedly used YouTube content for training.

Oodles of other websites and content have been used for AI training as part of the open-source dataset called the “Common Crawl.” This could have already included Photobucket images hosted on other sites.

Leonard said Photobucket is in talks with several companies to license the images. Rather than a one-shot deal where, say, OpenAI gets images to use forever, the potential deals are generally for a few years and for specific content.

“A company will come to us and say, ‘We need content of landscapes with people in a distance, and we’re looking for beach and mountains,'” Leonard explained. “So we say, ‘OK, great. Based on that request, we have 150,000 images that we can license you.'”

Photobucket estimates about half of its 13 billion images are public and eligible for AI licensing.

Notifying users about the new Terms of Service

Leonard said Photobucket sent an email in July to its customers alerting them to an update to its Terms of Service. The update outlined how public images may be used for AI training, including “scanning and processing of the Public User Uploaded Content, including extracting physical features, e.g. measurements, of your Biometric Information (e.g., face, iris, etc.), for the purpose of artificial intelligence and machine learning training.”

I have an old Photobucket account from around 2007 that I used for hosting images for an old blog. For the past few years, I’ve gotten emails with increasingly dire warnings that my account was at risk of being deactivated. (It hasn’t been.) At some point years ago, I had already downloaded the images and stored them elsewhere, so I wasn’t too concerned. (I do continue to pay $10 a month for my old personal photos on Flickr.)

Presumably, there are plenty of people like me with an old Photobucket account, largely forgotten — maybe abandoned because we moved the photos somewhere else or simply didn’t care. And then there’s another group of people who aren’t even getting these emails: Maybe they signed up with a student email that they can’t access anymore, or maybe they long ago forgot their username and password combination.

Leonard said Photobucket has been attempting to reach customers through email, on-site alerts, and other methods (including alerting users in the press, like in this story).

I did receive the email from Photobucket alerting me about the new policy, but like most other emails about updated Terms of Service, I simply didn’t bother opening it.

“There’s kind of a two-way street where if you put a whole bunch of personal memories on the site, maybe you should do your best to continue to update the email address and everything like that,” Leonard said.