Artists Can Now Fight Back Against AI with Nightshade

Artists have been mostly defenseless when it comes to having their work used by AI tools like Dall-E, Stable Diffusion or Midjourney. There are some outstanding lawsuits, companies like Steam have forbidden AI generated assets and there efforts to implement standards to prevent crawlers from indexing art. Now though, there are tools for Artists to actually fight back. The University of Chicago team that created Glaze, a tool for preventing art from being trained on, has now created Nightshade, a tool that actually ruins AI datasets if trained on.

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[a_lethe_ion]

The best shit is that if the AI models never scrape works they don't have consent for, their models won't be poisoned

[Zere]

Imagine if all this effort would have gone to eliminating boring soul crushing jobs like burger flipping, instead of deleting jobs people actually ENJOY doing. Sad times.

[SylvanFeanturi]

Glazing could be useful for previews. Something you put on your open portfolio page and if someone wants to buy the copy, you sent un-glazed one.

[brucesmith]

I'm guessing Nightshade works like the old game Telephone but for AI, where "I went to the store today" down the line turns into "Your mom is an orange."

[Mizuuri]

I think this could have potential with a few adjustments. The end results should just be messed up smeared garbage instead of just turning a dog into a cat, and they should place viruses into the keywords so it slows down all AI programs that use the images to a near crawl.

[kthxpls]

The scary thing is, just reading some comments I can see a lot of people that almost want AI to be a thing, the problem will always be that specific group that want to do whatever they want, just because they feel like it, if laws are created to put this people in jail or a harsh punishment for stealing other people's work, people would stop using this garbage in two seconds.

[in-craig-ible]

Anything that can help creators defend themselves is a good thing in my opinion.

[Henry_GamesX]

I think that eventually artists are going to have their own A I. tools to counter what A.I. is doing with their art.

[LauraTeKiwiBirb]

This is why I upload low resolution copies of my work. I'm not letting AI train on my stuff without my consent.

[puckcanuck]

This is just standard arms-race stuff, it'll probably be made useless in a month when network architectures change since the glazing changes depend on how existing networks analyze the art anyways. In other words, this isn't set-it-and-forget-it as a solution, artists will need to remain vigilant and reupload their works with updated protections all the time.

[gitbuhqwerty]

Nightshade totally is stopping AI. Good work.

[SergTTL]

This is great! I really hope this will work for a long time and do a big impact on all the unethically trained models.
If this works, I want to donate money to this guys!

[hardwiretoo]

Saw this a few days ago. I dig it and I see no reason to NOT do it for artwork posted online, or even materials provided to a client. If a client wants non-poisoned submitables they can pay extra.

[alverikluna]

Something tells me some artists where just as frightened when the Camera was first introduced, but it will have the same effect in the end. Anyway, AI can't go to a wedding to draw/take pictures of specific people or play the guitar in an event or do a real oil painting. Doing the real thing is probably going to have even more value later on. In the end, the pure Text To Image usage people with no skill use has limited use (since it's RANDOM, someone using AI like this will have it super hard to do a comic or story board or anything that needs permanent, well developed, characters). But digital artists can use ControlNet along with StableDiffusion to get more specific results. But to properly use ControlNet you HAVE to have digital artist skills. Else you can't do techniques like photobashing and mapbashing. If you are a digital artist, I say stop looking at AI as your replacement, and start seeing it as a tool to speed up your workflow. (With ControlNet you can also turn your lineart into finished images, and a lot of other cool stuff. Some people actually create Lora's or SD models using their own art so they can quickly make art that uses their own style).

[OxyShmoxy]

I see the same comment "b-but the artists also learned by studying someone's art, they dare to stop the AI progress now!?" again and again.
It's ridiculous that I have to explain this, but the difference between a computer and a human is that computers literally use stolen data by storing and processing it the way that wasn't intended or agreed on by the data owner. The artists, on the other hand, aren't doing anything illegal by using someone else's art the way the author intended, by watching it. Computers can't "watch, " and neither can the text generators "learn" anything. Pirate "AI" apologists are just deluding themselves by humanizing the data processing.

[joa]

I would like it if more AI tech was _actually developed with the goal of aiding art-making processes_, instead of trying to somehow outmode entire fields of human expression. Just give us handy tools, whether they streamline arduous, entirely uncreative/unexpressive cleanup work, or do things humans just straight up cannot do no matter how much time we spend on it.

Stuff like making photogrammetry tools that require fewer photos, aren’t thrown off by metallic and transparent surfaces, and perhaps even automatically generate suitable shaders and pbr maps as a starting point. Or depth estimation from videos, or compositing tools that accurately colour correct one layer to match another, or 3D modelling tools that handle the topology for you and keep it all according to best practices. Make rotoscoping hair less miserable. Allow game characters to blend between animations naturally. Markerless mocap! Begin the slow process of letting me heal from the irreparable damage UV unwrapping has done to my psyche.

Just for the love of christ cut the ‘we can get robots to replace poets and painters!’ nonsense. Why? It’s like getting robots to replace ice-cream tasting, or parenting, or experiencing sunsets. What the _hell_ are we doing on this earth, as people, as a _species_, if we’re trying to automate the parts of life that bring us joy? Things many of us spend our menial workdays wishing we could hurry back home and continue? Are we ultimately just supposed to give up, die, and let machines wear our clothes, play our video games, bathe our pets, make jam, grow old? That’s bullshit.

We’re human, and wherever we’ve gone over the last 100, 000 years, we’ve always found time for music and craft. For dancing, feasting, and telling each other stories. Not because it’s efficient, or profitable, or even because it requires skill. We just like doing it, and it brings us closer to each other.

[RealmsOfThePossible]

And within a few days someone came up with an antidote, back to the drawing board.

[Andlekin]

We'll see how effective this is after Nightshade releases. I do think the team behind Glaze and Nightshade could turn this into a business. I expect this to be an endless arms race.

[hyperspeed]

I hate that machine learning models (I refuse to call any of what we have now AI because it just isn’t) are being used like this because creative works are what we’re supposed to finally have time to focus on when automation removes the need for menial jobs. Instead the automation is taking away the already fleeting opportunity to make a living off of being creative for the few fortunate enough to do so now

[einasam]

I tried glaze, and it didn't work. It kept giving me an error message and even froze my computer one time. I tried downloading all versions for windows, redownloading, restarting, searching the web for solutions and even tried to contact the development team. They didn't respond and I couldn't find a solution on my own so I gave up.