tried to make a list of options for people who don't consent to their images (or text) being used for model training. i can't personally vouch for the effectiveness of each of these-- i just thought people would like to see what's available
AFAIK the goal of these isn't to Protect Your Art Forever, but to make images increasingly inconvenient to use in datasets w/o permission
Glaze - UChicago's tool to add "adversarial noise" to art to disrupt style mimicry. Runs on Windows and Mac (Nvidia GPU required)
WebGlaze - free browser-based Glaze service for those who can't run Glaze locally. request an invite by following their instructions
Mist - an adversarial noise tool by Psyker Group. Runs on Windows and Linux (Nvidia GPU required) or on web with a Google Colab Notebook
Nightshade - UChicago's tool to distort AI's recognition of features, presented as an optional "last step" before uploading images online. Runs on Windows and Mac (Nvidia GPU required)
Just Add A Regular Watermark - it doesn't take a lot of processing power to add a watermark, so why not? try adding complexities like warping, changes in color/opacity, and blurring to make it more annoying for an AI (or a human) to remove
given that energy consumption was the focus of some AI art criticism, i'm not sure if the benefits of these GPU-intensive tools outweigh the cost; i'd like to hear from someone more knowledgeable about that. i also want to warn that some AI users seek out data-poisoned images for testing to try to "defeat" these tools, so maybe don't advertise whether you're using them/which ones you're using!
Discouraging data scraping
Have I Been Trained? - a tool by Spawning to search for images in existing datasets and opt your images out of future datasets. try searching for usernames!
Kudurru - a tool by Spawning (currently a Wordpress plugin) in closed beta that purportedly blocks AI scrapers from your website
robots.txt - if you have your own website, this is a text file you place in the home directory to tell web crawlers which parts of the site you want to allow them to access. this article has instructions for blocking bots that scrape data for AI like ChatGPT and Google Bard (this all kind of works on an honor system, to be clear)
HTML metadata - the article above also suggests placing the following within your pages' headers:
<meta name="robots" content="noai, noimageai">
ai.txt - similar to robots.txt, a new type of permissions file for AI training created by Spawning
ArtShield Watermarker - web-based tool to add Stable Diffusion's "invisible watermark" to images, so data scraping bots may recognize the image as AI-generated and ignore it. Source on GitHub. doesn't seem to have been updated since last year?
be aware of any downloads or services that seem sketchy or "too good to be true." don't let anyone take advantage of your fear/panic!
lastly, i shouldn't have to say this but please don't be discouraged from describing images because of weird conspiracy theories e.g. "people are only pushing for alt text for the benefit of AI!" if you think it would be funny to add misleading alt text to "stick it to the AI bros" please check your priorities (and theoretically, Nightshade becomes more effective when pairing accurate image descriptions with "poisoned" data!)