Artists threatened by artificial intelligence studying their work and then copying their styles have teamed up with university researchers to prevent such imitations.
American illustrator Paloma McClain is defending herself after learning that several artificial intelligence models have been "trained" using her art without being acknowledged or compensated.
"That bothered me. I believe that truly significant technological advances are made in an ethical way that uplift all people, rather than functioning at the expense of others," McClain told AFP.
The artist turns to free software called Glaze, created by researchers at the University of Chicago.
Glaze essentially outperforms AI models when it comes to how they are trained, adjusting pixels in ways that are indistinguishable to the human eye but make the digitized artwork look dramatically different to the AI.
"Essentially, we're providing technical tools that help protect human creators against invasive and abusive AI models," says computer science professor Ben Zhao of the Glaze team.
Created in just four months, Glaze is based on technology used to disrupt facial recognition systems.
"We worked at an ultra-high speed because we knew the problem was serious," Zhao said.
The generative artificial intelligence giants have agreements to use data for training in some cases, but most of the digital images, audio and text used to shape the way the super-intelligent software thinks have been plucked from the Internet without express consent.
Since its launch in March 2023, Glaze has been downloaded more than 1.6 million times.
Zhang's team is working on an enhancement to Glaze called Nightshade, which improves defenses by confusing the AI, such as making it interpret a dog as a cat.
"I believe that Nightshade will have a noticeable effect if enough artists use it and release enough 'poisonous' images on the web," the researcher said.
According to the Chicago academic, Zhao's team has been approached by several companies that want to use Nightshade.
"The goal is for people to be able to protect their content, whether it's individual artists or companies that deal with intellectual property protection," Zhao emphasized. /BGNES
