Hey, you! Do you hate AI art generation? Me too! Here is the information you need to sabotage AI using Nightshade!
*Note: Information on how it works and links to articles about it are below the cut (as well as examples). Also, I am no expert on AI or Nightshade, so take everything I say with a grain of salt.*
*More Important Note: Due to the way the program works with adding artifacting to your art to make it poison to AI, it is very likely that it would get your art marked as "AI" if you run it through an AI detector. Not sure if that matters to anyone, but it's important to note.*
Guides for Installing and Information
Nightshade from the University of Chicago
Nightshade User and Installation Guide
How it Works
AI art generation is trained on art taken from the internet. And artists put their art on the internet. So, how do you stop AI from stealing it? You don't. You "poison" your art, which messes with how AI views it. To poison your art, people can use the "Nightshade" program created by Prof. Ben Zhao and the Nightshade Team from the University of Chicago.
This poisoning actually causes the AI model's dataset to malfunction! As stated in an article by Melissa Heikkilä from MIT Technology Review, "The poisoned data is very difficult to remove, as it requires tech companies to painstakingly find and delete each corrupted sample." Feeding AI 100 poisoned pieces of art is enough to ruin the generation, making the prompt "car" turn into... a cow...
However, it's always good to consider this program's limitations. As stated in the article from the Nightshade Team, "[1] Changes made by Nightshade are more visible on art with flat colors and smooth backgrounds. Because Nightshade is about disrupting models, lower levels of intensity/poison do not have negative consequences for the image owner. Thus we have included a low intensity setting for those interested in prioritizing the visual quality of the original image. [2.] As with any security attack or defense, Nightshade is unlikely to stay future proof over long periods of time. But as an attack, Nightshade can easily evolve to continue to keep pace with any potential countermeasures/defenses."
Don't feel like actively ruining AI models, but still want to protect your art? Try Glaze, a program created by the same people who created Nightshade.
Learn More
Nightshade from the University of Chicago
Nightshade User and Installation Guide
MIT Technology Review
Medium Article
(also, i forgot how much i loved doing research for stuff, and this is literally such a cool program imo. even if you don't use it, you should look at the ai-generated art from batches that are poisoned, cuz they are so funny to look at.)
For all you Artists and Writers, PLEASEEE Listen up!!
Tumblr is planning on allowing AI tools like OpenAI and Midjourney to use your shit!!
PLEASE make sure you click on this little button in your blog settings to NOT ALLOW THEM STEAL YOUR HARD WORK.
If you do not see this option you might need to logout and back in again (like I had to) or refresh your page!
Also consider getting Nightshade and or Glade if you wanna fuck up these AI programs!
Nightshade Website here.
Glaze Website here.
Other Links about this issue.
https://vxtwitter.com/jason_koebler/status/1762544388843212929
https://vxtwitter.com/54bpm_/status/1762582757165977640
https://vxtwitter.com/yasosume/status/1762606649481839062
MAKE SURE TO REBLOG SO OTHER PEOPLE CAN KNOW ABOUT THIS!!!
What are your thots on this Glaze program some artists are using? Alsoz do you happen to know how it works 🤔 im personally curious as to what its actually doing, if anything. Seems a bit grifty to me offhand, tbh
Near as I can tell glaze works like a lot of invisible watermark systems by adding subtle noise to the image that is supposedly unnoticeable to humans but will disrupt the attempt to train on an image by changing how the image turns from coherence into noise in the learning process.
I'm not an expert in that aspect of the process, but I am an expert on image editing, and I have strong doubts about whether anything like Glaze can work. I know a half dozen ways off the top of my head to alter every pixel in an image without noticeably changing the overall image, most of them easily automated via simple macro.
I won't say its a scam (they aren't taking money, so suspicion is lessened. They might be trying to get bought out by a big tech firm, but at first glance they seem to be sincere), but it don't expect it would take much for a scraping system to be made to recognize Glazed images, apply a counter-filtering, and re-process the image. It might stop some beginner-types who are training their own Dreambooth models on specific artists they like.
Anyone even mildly determined will likely find a workaround, and everything prior to this point, and at this point, most of your dataset revisions for your major image-gen AIs are around expanding what things the AI can replicate more than styles.
Art styles aren't that unique, they're 99.99% blends of styles the artist likes, usually heavily influenced by the aesthetics they found most appealing in their early teens. That stuff, for the current generation, is all in LIAON-5B already. You just have to find the right combination of prompting choices and you can get something close enough to most styles, even if the specific AI isn't trained on that artist's work.
I'm running my whole art portfolio through Glaze. If you don't know, it's a program build by a group of uni students that's won awards and is designed to basically prevent AI libraries from being able to meaningfully "learn" anything from your art. It can be found here for free. It wouldn't run on my actually functional laptop (it tried rendering for 2 days straight and then got to something like "Time remaining: -200 minutes" and still never spat out anything completed). So, while waiting for the seemingly endless rendering to stop and a reply for access to their Web option, I decided to try something a little off the wall.
I ended up taking my largely non-functional old laptop (8+ yr old Dell Latitude i7) I hadn't figured out how to safely dispose of yet and see if I could give it new life. It was a mid-tier "gaming" laptop when I purchased it, though I needed the specs for heavy graphics work for work as an artist and as I was, for a time, still in uni for engineering before switching majors. It currently won't run most of the programs I need for work - it abjectly refuses to open Krita no mater what I do, and throws a fit and crashes with even GIMP sometimes. I even have to be careful with internet browsers now with that one.
Its hard drive is pretty toast, hence why I needed to suck it up and get a new laptop. Something is damaged in a way I couldn't make a proper clone of the drive and something's fucked with the BIOS is fucked in a way I couldn't even run a recovery usb and it has no disk drive. It makes frightening noises from frequently trying to run its HDD at 100%.
The casing itself is held together with duct tape and spite. This laptop survived several moves and homelessness before finally being too finicky to put up with after wife and I were rehoused. It literally requires support at all times to not be torn further apart by the weight of its own screen. It also needs to be elevated in a way to give the fans a little help. It's a technological senior citizen.
Despite the hard drive being largely toast, the OS still works pretty fine. The RAM isn't high as I'd like, but it's not bad, either. It's main draw for this very specific purpose is the dual GPUs. There's a version of Glaze that you can force to run off a GPU instead of the CPU and make it go MUCH, MUCH (from my experience, literally 5-10 times or more faster).
I had a Solid State Drive lying around from when I'd attempted to keep the old laptop alive longer, so I stuck it in my external dock, installed Glaze on it, and filled it up with a folder of art to be Glazed.
It then proceeded to take about a day and a half of fussing with graphics drivers - including uninstalling the one the uni students recommended and going back to my old one because the one they recommended was technically compatible but was borking things for some reason, and manually changing settings to force the computer to use the correct beefier GPU for the program. I also had to uninstall a ton of shit that was slowing my computer down and sometimes making it lock up entirely - things I used to need when I used that laptop for normal purposes but no longer needed there (things like Steam, Discord, Grammarly, etc).
So long as I don't run much of anything off of the internal HDD outside a couple Windows Explorer windows for viewing files and Task Manager to keep an eye on hardware status, it mostly stays nice and quiet now other than a few spikes here and there with low % usage. Glaze runs smoothly off the external SSD, the CPU and RAM usage remain pretty stable and manageable during rendering, with the GPU usage only at a little over half the computer's total capability.
Despite being bested by much simpler daily usage, this old shell of a laptop now renders a resource-intensive program over in a corner and I can just check it every couple hours to see how it's doing.
I'm looking forward to prticipate to Artfight and for it, I need to protect my art agaibst AI.
Not that I accuse AF of anything, but I want to be able to repost attack on Instagram myself and also to let people repost my attack on Insta or any other social media, in fact.
