<
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/23/1082189/data-poisoning-artists-fight-generative-ai/>
"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.
The team intends to integrate Nightshade into Glaze, and artists can choose
whether they want to use the data-poisoning tool or not. The team is also
making Nightshade open source, which would allow others to tinker with it and
make their own versions. The more people use it and make their own versions of
it, the more powerful the tool becomes, Zhao says. The data sets for large AI
models can consist of billions of images, so the more poisoned images can be
scraped into the model, the more damage the technique will cause."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
