A new tool lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it’s scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways.
The tool, called Nightshade, is intended as a way to fight back against AI companies that use artists’ work to train their models without the creator’s permission. Using it to “poison” this training data could damage future iterations of image-generating AI models, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, by rendering some of their outputs useless—dogs become cats, cars become cows, and so forth. MIT Technology Review got an exclusive preview of the research, which has been submitted for peer review at computer security conference Usenix.
AI companies such as OpenAI, Meta, Google, and Stability AI are facing a slew of lawsuits from artists who claim that their copyrighted material and personal information was scraped without consent or compensation. Ben Zhao, a professor at the University of Chicago, who led the team that created Nightshade, says the hope is that it will help tip the power balance back from AI companies towards artists, by creating a powerful deterrent against disrespecting artists’ copyright and intellectual property. Meta, Google, Stability AI, and OpenAI did not respond to MIT Technology Review’s request for comment on how they might respond.
Zhao’s team also developed Glaze, a tool that allows artists to “mask” their own personal style to prevent it from being scraped by AI companies. It works in a similar way to Nightshade: by changing the pixels of images in subtle ways that are invisible to the human eye but manipulate machine-learning models to interpret the image as something different from what it actually shows.
Let's stop aggrandizing it by calling it "artificial intelligence," and begin calling it what it really is: plagiarism software.
There is no artificial intelligence. It's not creating anything, just copying existing work by existing artists and changing it enough to skirt copyright laws: there's a reason why everything is all "in the style of Wes Anderson" or "in the style of Ernest Hemingway." So don't say "an artist generated these images using artificial intelligence," but rather "someone made this using plagiarism software."
Don't say "a marketing company utilized artificial intelligence to make this ad," but rather "created by a marketing company using plagiarism software."
By allowing the companies making the plagiarism software to call it "artificial intelligence" or "text algorithms," you're giving them newspeak to hide what they're making, and what their users are doing: it's just plagiarism. Nothing else.
(ironically I use Google lens to copy the text for text ID like this)
A new publisher has claimed it aims to “disrupt” the books industry by publishing 8,000 books in 2025 alone using artificial intelligence.
I want to talk about an article I saw from thebookseller.com that came out Monday which talks about a new AI-powered publishing platform called Spines which wants to disrupt the publishing industry by providing a new platform. I encourage you to read the actual article here, but I want to address how they are, based on my own observation as an independent author, a grift and why you shouldn’t fall for it.
Let’s address the first concern which I and probably a few other people have when presented with Spines’s goal of publishing 8,000 books in 2025 alone. Doing a very quick, unscientific google search, we can find that of the biggest traditional publishers in the United States, only Penguin Random House and Harper Collins publish more than 8,000 books a year, and these are massive global corporations. The next two largest, Hachette Book Group and Simon & Schuster, publish only roughly 2,000 books a year and these are still some of the big boys on the block. So the goal of publishing 8,000 books a year is certainly ambitious for Spines. How is this going to be done?
There are two possibilities and one is that a lot of this is going to be books produced in part or entirely by plagiarism software (“AI”). I want to acknowledge that as a real possibility, but I want to go forward with the good-faith assumption that there will be a significant number of passionate people who have poured their heart and soul into writing a book and are going to be taken advantage of by these techbros. Even before plagiarism software became widely available, self-publishing on Amazon had exploded and we saw millions of books self-published in just an ebook form every year. So I imagine that these people, who are self-publishing on Amazon and other places, are probably the market for Spines.
Now how do I know this is a scam? I do not have a ton of experience is self-publishing because I’ve only published two books at time of writing, but I do have recent hands-on experience which makes me qualified. There isn’t a lot of info in the article on what services Spines is offering but we get an exact number on cost as well as types of services in the article. “Spines costs $1,200 to $5,000 to automate proofreading, cover design, metadata optimisation and limited translation services, starting with Spanish.” Now, this may, on the low end, be cheaper than hiring professionals to do this kind of work, but it’s still going to be a scam because you’re going to get a shoddy product.
Let’s start with proofreading, which is under the umbrella of editing but is one of several types of editing. As Reedsy explains, there are four distinct types of editing, all of which come with specific costs. First there is editorial assessment, which is when you have a very, very rough draft and need some direction on writing it. (I have not yet done editorial assessment because I have been fortunate enough to be plagued with the knowledge of what I’m writing.) This is very broad advice which an AI cannot provide but a human can. Second is developmental editing for a finished manuscript, which is where you have an editor go through, provide specific feedback on areas for improvement and suggestions, and point out any major issues. This is where you get into rewrites and polishing a manuscript to a finished product. Again, and AI cannot do this.
So we finally come to copy editing and proofreading. Now, I’m going to fold them together although they are technically distinct because copy editing includes proofreading as well as making sure capitalization is consistent, tenses remain consistent, you don’t repeat yourself too much, all the little things which help polish the rough edges off of your manuscript. Proofreading is checking for spelling and typos, as well as grammar issues and any formatting issues. AI can do this, as tools like Grammarly exist for this sort of thing for a couple years now. (I wouldn’t recommend using Grammarly, but that’s a separate rant for a separate day.) Plus, you know, spellcheck which has been around since the 1990s. Technically this is a task which AI can do, but it can still make mistakes such as with homophones (the train went threw the tunnel). And with so many free tools available if you’re going to have AI do this task, why pay someone else to do it? AI is not going to give you insightful, meaningful feedback on your manuscript, but it will do spellcheck for you and LibreOffice does that for free anyway. So paying to have AI proofread your manuscripts doesn’t make any financial sense.
Let’s move on to the next area they want to automate, cover design. Again, I have limited experience and I can say very definitively that you can get a good cover for about $750 USD from a professional artist who will produce what you want and will be able to keep things you like but change things you don’t with an incomplete project. Plagiarism software that creates images cannot do that. Unless they’re hiring artists to touch up and improve generated images (which I doubt), all Spines is offering is another service you can get for free or cheaper elsewhere online. I highly advise against generating your cover images, if only for the fact the computer cannot give you exactly what you want. You can feed prompts into it and maybe get something close enough, but if you have a specific image of what you want for your book cover you cannot get that from AI. There are a lot of ethical arguments against plagiarism software as well, but I won’t repeat those here just for brevity’s sake. Again, if you’re willing to use plagiarism software to make your book cover, which is what the guys at Spines are offering, then you can do that cheaper elsewhere.
The final one which I can speak with any authority on is metadata, which I’ve had to enter for my own books before and you can too. For those who don’t know, metadata is information attached to the book’s ISBN and publication info that provides info about the book. This can be basic info such as the intended audience, the genre, and the subject matter, but it can also be more granular like what type of fantasy novel you have (romantasy vs cozy). While it can be an annoying or frustrating task, such as when every word to describe my book flies out of my head when I have to actually describe it, it’s also fairly simple. And I’m going to be honest, I don’t expect the AI to do much more beyond algorithm scraping and suggesting metadata like “for you” and “trending”. (Sort of like those videos that spam every popular tag in the hope of getting traction.) So I seriously doubt that this will be a service worth any sum of money.
Finally I’m going to touch briefly on translation because I haven’t translated a book and I don’t know what goes into translating one either but I can make an educated guess that it’s going to be the equivalent of pasting your manuscript into Google Translate. If you’re willing to accept that level of quality, you can get it for free. If you want a good translation you’re going to have to shell out far more money to get an actual person to do it.
And all of this doesn’t even get to a very important part of publishing, ISBNs. If you’re self-publishing you absolutely want to buy your own ISBNs, and buy multiple because they cost less if you buy them in bulk and you will need separate ISBNs for both the print and digital editions of your books. I don’t know if Spines is offering ISBNs as part of their package, they certainly could, but for independent authors it’s best practice to use your own ISBNs because you can control those opposed to whatever platform you publish on.
So are the AI-powered services that Spines is going to provide be worth it? I highly doubt it. For the amount of money you’ll end up spending you’d be better off actually hiring humans to help you with your book and get it to a finished, polished state. I can’t see this company offering you anything that isn’t already available for free or nearly free elsewhere with the same lackluster quality. If you have something you’re writing, you’re passionate about it, and you want to publish it, I highly encourage you to get real human beings to help you improve it. Reedsy (which this is not an ad for) is the platform I have used to get in contact with editors and artists to help get my books out into the world. But I’m sure plenty of other independent authors can help you find all sorts of other people able and willing to help. Spines is merely charging you for the privilege of receiving substandard work spat out by a computer.
