A new tool lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it’s scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways.
The tool, called Nightshade, is intended as a way to fight back against AI companies that use artists’ work to train their models without the creator’s permission.
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Zhao’s team also developed Glaze, a tool that allows artists to “mask” their own personal style to prevent it from being scraped by AI companies. It works in a similar way to Nightshade: by changing the pixels of images in subtle ways that are invisible to the human eye but manipulate machine-learning models to interpret the image as something different from what it actually shows.
So tl;dr he/his team did two things:
On the surface it sounds all good, but I can’t help but notice a future conflict of interest for Zhao should Glaze ever become monetized. If it were to be ruled illegal to train AI on content without permission, tools like Glaze would be essentially anti-theft devices, but while it remains legal to train AI this way, tools like Glaze stand to perhaps become necessary for artists to maintain the pre-AI status quo w/r/t how their work can be used and monetized.