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.
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.
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. At least in the text2img case img2img is a different matter, but in that case the onus is on the user of the model to make sure that they can use the input image, not of the model creator.
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.