This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI
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.
[...]
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.
I don't see a problem with it training on all materials, fuck copyright. I see the problem in it infringing on everyone's copyright and then being proprietary, monetized bullshit.
If it trains on an open dataset, it must be completely and fully open. Everything else is peak capitalism.
You’re not owed nor entitled to an artist’s time and work for free.
Of course not, it's the artists decision to put it on the internet for free.
Technically that's the root of the issue. This does not grant a license to everyone who looks at it, but if a license is required to train a model is unclear and currently discussed in court.
The problem is the only way for artists to get people to see and eventually buy their art or commissions is to post some of their work publicly. Historically you would go out on the street and set up a stall, now social media is our digital street. Galleries don’t take everyone, having the ability to even get a meeting with one is difficult without the right connections. Most artists are never successful enough to completely live off their art, if they can make any money at all it is great for them. Then along comes an AI model that takes their work because it’s on the internet scrapes it into its training set and now any chance they had in an over saturated market is even smaller, because hey, I can just do this with AI. This idea that copyright and IP shouldn’t exist at all is kinda absurd. Would you just go through a street art walk, take high res photos of every picture they have on display, not take any business cards, and when they ask what you are doing, go “it’s ok, I’m training an AI data model so people can just make work that looks exactly like this. They shouldn’t have to ever buy from you. Capitalism is a joke. Bye!” The art walk was free, but it was also a sales pitch, because that’s how the art world works. You are hoping to get seen, that someone likes it enough to buy, and maybe buy more.
For the majority of human existence, that was the default.
Copyright exists as an explicit tradeoff between the rights of the public to be able to do as they please with stuff introduced into the public sphere, and a legal limitation infringing on the publics liberty for a limited time for the purpose of encouraging the creation of more works for the public benefit. It was not introduced as some sort of inherent right, but as a trade between the public and creators to incentivise them.
Stripping it away from existing artists who has come to depend on it without some alternative would be grossly unfair, but there's nothing absurd about wanting to change the bargain over time. After all, that has been done many times, and the copyright we have now is vastly different and far more expansive and lengthy than early copyright protection.
Personally, I'd be in favour of finding alternative means of supporting creators and stripping back copyright as a tradeoff. The vast majority of creators earn next to nothing from their works; only a very tiny minority makes a livable wage of art of any form at all, and of the rest the vast majority of profits take place in a very short period of initial exploitation of a work, so we could allow the vast majority to earn more from their art relatively cheaply, and affect the rest to a relatively limited degree, while benefiting from the reduced restrictions.
I agree that copyright lasts far too long, but the idea I can post a picture today, and in a hour it’s in an AI model without my consent bothers me. Historically there was a person to person exchange. But now we are so detached from it all I don’t think we can have that same affordance of no types of protections. I’m not saying one person can solve this. But I don’t see UBI or anything like that ever happening. As a person who has lived on disability most of their life, people don’t like to share their wealth with anyone for any reason. I’ve never been able to sell art for a living and am now going to school for data science. So I know about both ends of this. Just scraping without consent is unethical and many who do this have no idea about the art world or how artist create in general.
I doesn't need to be full on UBI. In a lot of countries grants mechanisms and public purchasing mechanisms for art already make up a significant proportion of income for artists. Especially in smaller countries, this is very common (more so for literary works, movies and music where language provides a significant barrier to accessing a bigger audience, but for other art too). Imagine perhaps a tax/compulsory licensing mechanism that doesn't stop AI training but instead massively expands those funding sources for people whose data are included in training sets.
This is not stoppable, not least because it's "too cheap" to buy content outright.
I pointed out elsewhere that e.g. OpenAI could buy all of Getty Images for ~2% of their currently estimated market cap based on a rumoured recent cash infusion. Financing vast amounts of works for hire just creates a moat for smaller players while the big players will still be able to keep improving their models.
As such it will do nothing to protect established artists, so we need expansion of ways to fund artists whether or not inclusion of copyrighted works in training sets becomes restricted.
I don't hold this opinion at all.
I'm just saying that there are uses for which you don't need a license. Say, visiting an art exhibition and then going home and trying to draw similar pictures. Wether AI training falls into this category or instead requires a license is currently unclear.
Btw, two spaces before the line break
Creates the spacing you want.
I am perfectly entitled to type random stuff into google images, pick out images for a mood board and some as reference, regardless of their copyright status, thank you. Studying is not infringement.
It's what every artist does, it's perfectly legal, and what those models do is actually even less infringing because they're not directly looking at your picture of a giraffe and my picture of a zebra when drawing a zebra-striped giraffe, they're doing it from memory.
Art takes effort. You're not entitled to that for free.
And if you think that working with AI does not take effort you either did not try, or don't have an artistic bone in your body. Randos typing "Woman with huge bazingas" into an UI and hitting generate don't get copyright on the output, rightly so: Not just did they not do anything artistic, they also overlook all the issues with whatever gets generated because they lack the trained eye of an artist.