Hey, check out Glaze and Nightshade; two free and I think open-source tools developed by researchers at the University of Chicago to combat nonconsensual AI image scraping!
https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/
Glaze tricks Style Mimicry AI’s into thinking an art piece’s style is something wildly different - the example given in their website is tricking an AI into thinking a realist charcoal value drawing (like my pfp) is actually a colorful abstract splatter painting (think Jackson Pollock). It can’t even be circumvented with screenshots or using photoshop to smooth out pixels and stuff like that, so it will defeat all but the most dedicated and hands-on scrapers, and only if they themselves have an post-graduate collegiate level of understanding on how both their AI and Glaze work. And anyone with that kind of knowledge is very unlikely to be spending their time ripping off artists.
It also has some limited effectiveness against weaker image-to-image transformation models (like the little one built into Stable Diffusion), but stronger and more dedicated models like controlnet don’t break unless you use very high Glaze intensity settings, which can make it more noticeable to the human eye.
ALSO it can actually protect the un-glazed images you’ve already uploaded! Because it confuses AI’s about your style, if you start using Glaze, it will poison the AI’s dataset and still cause it to get confused about your style, even if you have a big online portfolio posted on websites like tumblr or Facebook which probably keep your images in their storage even if you take them down.
https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html
Nightshade, on the other hand, goes on the offensive. It poisons AI datasets regarding how they interpret the objects portrayed in an image. This causes the AI to start outputting nonsensical images that don’t match the prompt’s desired subject matter - the example given is it tricks the AI into thinking a cow is a leather purse. The more poisoned images of cows fed into the AI’s dataset, the more convinced the AI becomes that cows are brown leather bags with pockets, handles, zippers, and brand logos.
It’s most effective when used by lots of artists, especially groups who share subject matter (“person”, “cow”, “tree”, etc), so please spread the word amongst your peers AND to other genres of artists.
So, for you Ghilenan, if a bunch of people who do BG3 and D&D character commissions on tumblr use nightshade, ai scrapers will basically have to blacklist Tumblr as a source for BG3/D&D character portrait examples, because the whole well has been poisoned, even if only a small percentage of artists are poisonous.
If poisoned images get shared to other websites, they’ll start poisoning those wells, too. In a way, this kinda weaponizes dickhead reposters against AI, which I find particularly hilarious.
They currently can be used together, technically, maybe…
But they weren’t really designed for it. Nightshade might undercut the Anti-style-mimicry effectiveness of Glaze, so the devs currently recommend using only Glaze if you are at all worried about style mimicry - if you have a particularly unique style that is or may be targeted for concentrated style mimicry attacks.
But if you mostly do art of a style that isn’t very unique (like how my profile pic can be summed up as “charcoal realist value drawing”), then it’s probably better to use Nightshade.
HOWEVER, the devs are working on making a tool that does BOTH at the same time, in a single pass. I don’t know the time frame on this, but I eagerly await it.
Regardless, it can’t hurt to start using one or the other.