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Glaze - a tool for protecting your art from "AI" theft

polycounter lvl 17
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Lord McMutton polycounter lvl 17


These folks have made this tool that can apparently mess with the way image generators interpret specific pieces of art or images that get ran through it.


The group behind it consists of well-established names, so it's a trustworthy program. I had found a post listing them at one point, but I'm stuck on my phone for the time being and can't easily find it.


Here's the first artwork to be ran through it:

There are some examples of visible artifacts on the protected images.

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  • Neox
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    Neox veteran polycounter

    but how does it look when processed by ai? because lets face it, the majority of people doesnt care if it looks slightly different as slightly different is what they generate anyways?

  • Lord McMutton
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    Lord McMutton polycounter lvl 17

    There was an example posted somewhere within that Twitter thread- I can't find it, though.


    They showed the version the generator recreated as something akin to a messed up VHS tape- huge blocks of random colors and structural corruption

  • Lord McMutton
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    Lord McMutton polycounter lvl 17
  • poopipe
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    poopipe grand marshal polycounter

    Do we know if there's a paper to support this ? it sounds far-fetched to me.

    Even if it does work I have serious doubts it'll continue to work for more than about a week after it gets in someone's way

  • Lord McMutton
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    Lord McMutton polycounter lvl 17

    Here's the paper on it- still under peer review, though:


    If it does get engineered around, I wonder if that might give artists some ammo in terms of legal options- maybe it would prove malicious intent on the image generator's end?

  • poopipe
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    poopipe grand marshal polycounter

    We've discussed the legal stuff ad-nauseum on here. Like any copyright issue it's fundamentally unenforceable if the person doing the bad stuff is somewhere that bad stuff isn't illegal.


    As far as the tech goes..

    I have trouble believing it could ever guarantee an imperceptible change because the whole process is reliant on the source image being changed via style transfer.

    It certainly isn't imperceptible now


    It's probably good enough for most use cases though - eg. Portfolio

  • nOLpte8
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    nOLpte8 triangle

    You get the feeling it is going to be like a doctor treating bacteria. Yes there is a method to stop AI for now, but how long until the AI programs are able to overcome this band aid? Then you are going to need a Glaze 2.0, then AI art finds a way to get past 2.0 and repeat the process.

  • Lord McMutton
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    Lord McMutton polycounter lvl 17

    Yeah, you can see the artifacts of the process- they don't really interfere with the art itself any more than a watermark does, though.



    As it goes- thieves have ever been in an arms race against defensive countermeasures.

  • thomasp
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    thomasp hero character

    As far as enforceability is concerned shouldn't it be enough to outlaw the use of the data gained from scraping in the AI tools as well as put a stop to the practice as such? Presumably these companies will still want to do business on the open market and not hide out in North Korea or wherever.

    Then wouldn't the issue simply go away? Private users might swap the cherished database containing most of Artstation up to 2022 and keep old builds alive but any new development would have to happen on a clean slate and businesses would want to stay well clear of any possibly dodgy AI output.

  • poopipe
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    poopipe grand marshal polycounter

    yes, for sure.


    my point is that if someone decides it's worth their while to rip stuff off, they'll still do it.

    there's lots of knockoff spiderman pyjamas etc. that people make a decent living off.

  • Lord McMutton
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    Lord McMutton polycounter lvl 17

    That's always been the case with all manner of thievery.


    We still always lock our doors, as it were.

  • ModBlue
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    ModBlue polycounter lvl 7
    I don't think it changes much tbh. Most people aren't going to bother 'watermarking' their work because of how much effort it takes and if someone wants to rip off your pictures they will find a way to do it. A much better solution is to simply regulate the AI.
  • CyberdemoN_1542
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    CyberdemoN_1542 polycounter lvl 5
    ModBlue said:
    I don't think it changes much tbh. Most people aren't going to bother 'watermarking' their work because of how much effort it takes and if someone wants to rip off your pictures they will find a way to do it. A much better solution is to simply regulate the AI.
    See, AI regulation is not what's needed. What's needed is regulating how the DATA is used, which is much more plausible.

    Here's how I would do it:

    Unless it is part of the public domain, the data needs to be opt-in, completely transparent and royalties need to be paid to the artist/writer/programmer each time it is used.

    Because a large amount of data was used unconsensually, all AI will have to be retrained from scratch or they can't be used in commercial products. The models were trained using data that was acquired unethically. That means no more scraping ArtStation and Sketchfab.

    AI is nothing without our data. AI is here to stay but so far Adobe are the only ones doing this ethically.
  • EinMeister
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    EinMeister polycounter lvl 2
    Love this tool! The most obvious use case seems to be applying it on renders, but this got me thinking...
    Would I be able to use it on Sketchfab? I am not sure how it works, is it only for rendered images, or could I, let's say, use it on my textures?
    Or maybe we can get a similar feature on Sketchfab as noise. It already has grain in post processing, if a Glaze like feature would get added that could not be turned off it would maybe help the cause.

    I have had my art added to one of those "AI dataset" collections before the NoAI tag was added :(
  • Lord McMutton
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    Lord McMutton polycounter lvl 17
    so far Adobe are the only ones doing this ethically.
    That's not the case, I fear- their dataset is using content that was submitted before the Image Generators existed, with no way to opt-out, and no payment plan implemented to compensate submitted artists for the use of their material.

    Would I be able to use it on Sketchfab? 
    That's a good question- does anybody know how 3d artwork is fed to generators?

    You could always ask the folks on Twitter, or send an email through their website
  • pior
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    pior grand marshal polycounter
    lmao ironic spambot is ironic.
  • Alex_J
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    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    What is the purpose of such spam bots? Is it like the terminator, they try to feign being human then once we let our guard down they will share some link or something?
  • ModBlue
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    ModBlue polycounter lvl 7
    ModBlue said:
    I don't think it changes much tbh. Most people aren't going to bother 'watermarking' their work because of how much effort it takes and if someone wants to rip off your pictures they will find a way to do it. A much better solution is to simply regulate the AI.
    See, AI regulation is not what's needed. What's needed is regulating how the DATA is used, which is much more plausible.

    Here's how I would do it:

    Unless it is part of the public domain, the data needs to be opt-in, completely transparent and royalties need to be paid to the artist/writer/programmer each time it is used.

    Because a large amount of data was used unconsensually, all AI will have to be retrained from scratch or they can't be used in commercial products. The models were trained using data that was acquired unethically. That means no more scraping ArtStation and Sketchfab.

    AI is nothing without our data. AI is here to stay but so far Adobe are the only ones doing this ethically.
    Opt-in how?
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