The tools Glaze and Nightshade are giving artists hope that they can fight back against AI that hoovers internet data to train. Are they enough? Ben Z

The AI lab waging a guerrilla war over exploitative AI

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2024-11-14 07:30:05

The tools Glaze and Nightshade are giving artists hope that they can fight back against AI that hoovers internet data to train. Are they enough?

Ben Zhao remembers well the moment he officially jumped into the fight between artists and generative AI: when one artist asked for AI bananas.

A computer security researcher at the University of Chicago, Zhao had made a name for himself by building tools to protect images from facial recognition technology. It was this work that caught the attention of Kim Van Deun, a fantasy illustrator who invited him to a Zoom call in November 2022 hosted by the Concept Art Association, an advocacy organization for artists working in commercial media.

On the call, artists shared details of how they had been hurt by the generative AI boom, which was then brand new. At that moment, AI was suddenly everywhere. The tech community was buzzing over image-generating AI models, such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, which could follow simple word prompts to depict fantasylands or whimsical chairs made of avocados.

But these artists saw this technological wonder as a new kind of theft. They felt the models were effectively stealing and replacing their work. Some had found that their art had been scraped off the internet and used to train the models, while others had discovered that their own names had become prompts, causing their work to be drowned out online by AI knockoffs.