- A team at the University of Chicago has announced that it has discovered a new way to protect art from AI.
- Their program Glaze obscures images that give inaccurate data to the learning model.
- It has been downloaded over 890,000 times and gives artists a chance to compete against AI that acquires their work without their consent.
AI comes to Autumn Beverly in the fall of 2022.
It was just a few months after the 31-year-old Ohio-based began pursuing her art full-time and quit her day job as a dog trainer. She was trying to sell her own name by tweeting her own work, mostly colored pencil sketches of animals. The gigs were trickling in. We had a logo request here, and there was some concept art work there.
At that time, generative artificial intelligence was beginning to impress people online. AI will soon outperform human artists, Beverley said. Her new career was taking off, but there was little she could do.
Then it became personal. In October, Beverly checked the website and said, HaveIBeenTrained.comThis reveals whether the artwork or photo was used to teach the AI model.
Her recent work is just a fraction of what has been harvested. Even a drawing she posted on her image-sharing platform DeviantArt years ago was used to create a bot to replace her one day.
“I was afraid to even post my art anywhere. Until just before that, I was trying to spread my art around because I wanted people to see it, but now it’s almost dangerous. I did,” Beverly told Insider.
Thousands of artists share their dilemmas as AI dominates global attention. Selling her work online feeds the very machine that is trying to kill her career.
Glaze exploits ‘huge gap’ between AI and human understanding of art
Ben Zhao, a professor of computer science at the University of Chicago, says the answer may lie in how AI perceives visual information differently than humans.
His team created a freeware program this year called glaze, It can alter images in ways that fool AI learning models while minimizing changes visible to the human eye.
The work, which has been downloaded 893,000 times since its release in March, uses the artist’s computer to re-render images with visual noise.
The images can still be fed into AI learning models, but the data collected from them will be inaccurate, Zhao told Insider.
Even if Beverly used Glaze to alter his own art, humans would still be able to tell what the piece looked like. But cloaking would allow AI to recognize distinct features in another style of art, such as Jackson Pollock’s abstract paintings, Zhao said.
A glazed version of a scene featuring bison and wolves by Autumn Beverley.
autumn beverly
Glaze allows users to adjust cloaking intensity and render time (which can take up to 60 minutes).
Visual differences can be noticeable depending on what the user selects.
This Creative Commons image of the Statue of Liberty (far left) was glaze using Very Low (second from left), Medium (second from right), and Very High (far right). re-rendered with intensity setting.
Glaze may appear to distort images slightly, but the new rendering completely changes how AI models perceive photos and artwork, says Zhao.
And it should work across the board with today’s learning models, Zhao said, because it takes advantage of the fundamental gap between how AI reads images and how humans see them. .
“That huge gap has been there for 10 years. It has been proven that there is, and that is why attacks can still be carried out against machine models,” he said. He said.
Fusion of web comics and Van Gogh
Zhao says the main point of Glaze is to protect the artist’s personal style. His team conceived the program after being approached by artists who were concerned that AI models were specifically targeting individual works.
It’s already happening, he added. A team at the University of Chicago witnessed people selling programs online that were trained to imitate a single artist’s drawings and paintings.
“So someone downloads a ton of art from a particular account belonging to a particular artist, trains on these models, and says, ‘Here’s the artist’s place, you can download a few from me and pay for a few, and you’ll get this. You can put it in,’ said Mr. Zhao.
Sarah Andersen Creates and Runs Webcomics “Sarah’s Graffiti” Last year, we discovered AI text-to-image generators such as Stable Diffusion. I was able to draw comics in her signature style.
With as many followers on Instagram as she has, more than 4.3 million, she fears AI data about her work will be used as a powerful tool for online spoofing and harassment. , she told Insider.
“If you want to harass me, type ‘Sarah Andersen character’ and think of something really offensive and it will spat out four images,” said Andersen.
Andersen said she noticed that some art generators were becoming less effective at copying her work after taking the issue to several companies. However, an AI prompt sent to Midjourney in April included her name, along with general instructions unrelated to her drawing style, indicating that she bears a stylistical resemblance to her character. produced suspicious results.
AI Generation/Mid Journey
That’s where Glaze is naturally positioned to enter, said Zhao. If AI can’t gather accurate data about an artist’s style, it can’t replace the artist or copy the work.
In the meantime, Andersen has no way of deleting all the work she has consistently uploaded over the past 12 years. Plus, she said social media contributes nearly all of her current income.
She is one of the main plaintiffs in a case. $1 billion class action lawsuit It claims against AI companies such as OpenAI and Stability AI that they have trained models on billions of works of art without the consent of the artists.
Andersen hopes Glaze will act as a stopgap defense as the legal process continues.
“Before Glaze, there was no way to protect yourself from AI. It’s everywhere,” she said.
Glaze could spark an arms race between artists and AI, but that’s not the point
Ultimately, AI companies can easily get around Glaze if they want to, said Haibin Lu, a professor of information analytics at Santa Clara University who studies AI.
“If I were an AI company, I wouldn’t really worry too much about this. Glaze basically adds noise to the art. And if you really want to break that protection system, you can It’s very simple,” Lu told an insider.
In theory, this could lead to a quasi-arms race in which the AI company and the Glaze team continually try to outdo each other. But if AI companies are devoting resources to cracking Glaze, that goal has already been partially served, Zhao said.
“The whole point of security is to set the bar so high that people doing what they shouldn’t be doing can give up and find something they can do cheaper instead,” Zhao said.
Technical systems designed to protect someone’s work are legally protected in some countries, but it’s unclear whether a program like Glaze falls into that category, according to the University of Amsterdam’s information law. Professor Martin Senftleben told Insider.
“Personally, I can imagine a judge would be happy to say yes,” Zenfteben said.
What else can an artist expect?
For artists concerned about AI, there may be few alternatives to Glaze. If creators like Beverly and Andersen want to sue an AI company for copyright infringement, Zenfleben said it will have a hard time winning.
“The problem is that concepts, styles, ideas, etc. remain free under copyright rules, so mere imitation of style is usually not enough to claim copyright,” Zenfleben said. rice field. For example, “Harry Potter” author JK Rowling added that he’s not monopolizing the story of a boy who discovers he has magical powers.
One legal avenue for artists might be a licensing system that pays them if their art is used to teach AI, Zenfleben said. Alternatively, countries could collect profits from AI-generated works and put the money back into the pockets of artists, he added. But it could take years, even a decade, for these laws to come into force, he said.
Grays aims to fill in the gaps until these laws and guidelines are established, Zhao said.
“Glaze was never meant to be perfect,” he said. “The key was to deal with this threat for artists: either a complete loss of income, or they could go out and have someone replace their models.”
Meanwhile, Beverly has started posting her work online again with Glaze. I am one of the supporters of the platform. Believing her career was over, she stopped painting her paintings entirely from August to October, but now she produces and promotes about 10 new works a month. .
“If there is an ethical step forward, I think we should definitely push it. I am a digital artist and I use constantly updated programs in my work. No,” she said. “But I don’t like being exploited.”
OpenAI and Midjourney did not respond to insider requests for comment about Glaze. The Stability AI press team declined to comment because Glaze is unaffiliated third-party software, but said the new version of the art generator implements an opt-out request.
Laion, a nonprofit that collects art resources for machine learning, did not respond to multiple requests for comment from insiders about obtaining consent from artists.