Everywhere I look I see people turning to AI generators like ChatGPT to make images. I’m sure you’ve seen the flood of cartoon-style portraits with random objects that all look alike in your social media feed. Or the flyers crammed with so many images and words that you don’t even know where to look. Artists are even having people feed their work into AI platforms without their permission. So what can you do as an artist to protect art from AI scrapers?
Anti-AI clauses
The first step you can take to protect your art from AI theft is to add a clause to your contracts prohibiting the use of generative AI on your images. This protects you from clients who may purchase one piece of your work and generate the rest instead of paying you to create them. Your anti-AI clause also reassures clients that they are getting real human-made art.
Keep in mind that legal clauses won’t physically prevent people from uploading your images into AI generators. They can however give you a stronger legal case against thieves. Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer-and I don’t even play one on TV-so do not take this as legal advice. Talk to your own lawyer about adding an anti-AI clause to your contracts and terms of service on your site.
How generative AI works
Just because it’s called “artificial intelligence” doesn’t mean that it’s actually smart. What we call generative-AI is also called an LLM or large language model. These systems work by predicting the most common next step in a sequence. For text generators, it’s the most common next word. For image generators, it’s the most common pixel. They aren’t thinking like a human does. They are running patterns to make predictions. A lot of the time, the prediction is correct. Other times, the prediction is wildly wrong. We can also use this pattern recognition to protect art from AI. The processing tricks AI into misunderstanding our images. People still see the image as we want them to (or with minor imperfections). One thing you can do to protect your art from AI is add noise to your images using a service called Glaze.
Image processing to protect art from AI scrapers
Researchers at the Univeristy of Chicago are developing two different methods for artists to protect their art: Glaze and Nightshade. Glaze masks images so AI processors can’t read them. Nightshade tricks the processor into thinking the image is something different and helps confuse models on a larger scale than just one image. Both platforms are free to use.
Glaze is available as a desktop application for Mac and PC. The Glaze application uses your GPU so you can’t use it at the same time as design programs like Adobe Creative Suite or Affinity. It does take a few minutes to process your image. The more you add to the image, the longer it takes to run. I experimented with a painting I did back in college. One image I ran with the default options; the other with increased difference. Check out the difference in the processing below.
There’s also a web version of Glaze which is invite-only so I wasn’t able to test it out. Based on my experience with the desktop app, I’m sure it uses too many server resources for them to release to the public. Cara had a web version of Glaze that they took down because of the server costs.
What about watermarks to protect art from AI?
Artists have added watermarks to protect their work for years. Unfortunately watermarks don’t prevent AI image generators from copying the artwork. Although some AI generators might start to generate the watermark too. AI uses training data to learn so will ingest the watermarked image and still compare the pixel relationships.
How do you handle the threat of AI stealing your artwork?
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