Nightshade, the free tool that ‘poisons’ AI models, is now available for artists to use

Lee Duna@lemmy.nz to Technology@lemmy.world – 762 points –
Nightshade, the free tool that ‘poisons’ AI models, is now available for artists to use
venturebeat.com
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Reminder that this is made by Ben Zhao, the University of Chicago professor who stole open source code for his last data poisoning scheme.

Pardon my ignorance but how do you steal code if it's open source?

You don’t follow the license that it was distributed under.

Commonly, if you use open source code in your project and that code is under a license that requires your project to be open source if you do that, but then you keep yours closed source.

I still wouldn't call it stealing, but I guess "broke open source code licenses" doesn't have the same impact, but I'd prefer accuracy.

It’s piracy, distributing copyrighted works against the terms of its license. I agree stealing is not really the right word.

Distributing it would be one thing, but profiting off it?

I think it makes the most sense to think of it like stealing the way plagiarism is stealing.

He took GPLv3 code, which is a copyleft license that requires you share your source code and license your project under the same terms as the code you used. You also can't distribute your project as a binary-only or proprietary software. When pressed, they only released the code for their front end, remaining in violation of GPLv3.

Probably the reason they're moving to a Web offering. They could just take down the binary files and be gpl compliant, this whole thing is so stupid

I think that's what AGPL tries to prevent

Yes, but if the code they took is not AGPL then this loophole still applies

Yes, I meant more that AGPL was created to plug this particular loophole. As in, if it was AGPL, they couldn't do this.

That's true

Although I personally am not a fan of licences this strict, MIT+Apache2.0 seems good enough for me. Of course, that might change with time and precedents like this 😅

And as I said there, it is utterly hypocritical for him to sell snake oil to artists, allegedly to help them fight copyright violations, while committing actual copyright violations.