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Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators
- mattszaszko 3y agoThis timeline is getting quite similar to the second season of Pantheon.
- zirgs 3y agoDoes it survive AI upscaling or img2img? If not - then it's useless. Nobody trains AI models without any preprocessing. This is basically a tool for 2022.
- ink404 3y agoPaper is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.13828 https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.13828
- gmerc 3y agoDoing the work to increase OpenAIs moat
- Drakim 3y agoObviously AIs can just train on images that aren't poisoned.
- jsheard 3y agoIs it possible to reliably detect whether an image is poisoned? If not then it achieves the goal of punishing entities which indiscriminately harvest data.
- Drakim 3y agoIt's roughly in the same spot as reliably detecting if you have permission to use the image for your data training set in the first place. If it doesn't matter, then neither does the poisoning matter.
- Kalium 3y agoYou can use older images, collected from before the "poisoning" software was released. Then you don't have to. This, of course, assumes that "poisoning" actually works. Glaze and Nightshade and similar are very much akin to the various documented attacks on facial recognition systems. The attack does not exploit some fundamental flaw in how the systems work, but specific characteristics in a given implementation and version. This matters because it means that later versions and models will inevitably not have the same vulnerabilities. The result is that any given defensive transformation should be expected to be only narrowly effective.
- dist-epoch 3y agoAI's have learned much tougher things. You just need a small data set of poisoned images to learn it's features.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- KingOfCoders 3y ago[flagged]
- ozten 3y agoThe memetic weapons humans unleashed on other humans at art school to deter copying are brutal. Just wait until critique.
- dist-epoch 3y ago"Sorry, this is not art, is AI generated trash."
- HKH2 3y agoWho cares? With AI, you don't need art school. AI is making humanities redundant, and people are too proud to admit it. I can't believe how many people are not in awe of the possibilities of AI art, so it's great to see AI disturbing the cynics until they learn. Not everything is political, but I'll let them have this one.
- squidsoup 3y ago> With AI, you don't need art school. AI is making humanities redundant, and people are too proud to admit it. If you think this is true, you've never understood art. Art is a human endeavour fundamentally. What ML produces is not art.
- HKH2 3y agoSo what? You can gatekeep as much as you like, but whatever humans relate to as art is art.
- jurynulifcation 3y agoArtists learning to innovate a trade defend their trade from incursion by bloodthirsty, no-value-adding vampiric middle men attempting to cut them out of the loop.
- gumballindie 3y agoThis is excellent. We need more tools like this, for text content as well. For software we need GPL 4 with ML restrictions (make your model open source or not at all). Potentially even DRM for text.
- Quanttek 3y agoThis is fantastic. If companies want to create AI models, they should license the content they use for the training data. As long as there are not sufficient legal protections and the EU/Congress do not act, tools like these can serve as a stopgap and maybe help increase pressure on policymakers
- Kuinox 3y ago> they should license the content they use for the training data You mean like OpenAI and Adobe ? Only the free and open source models didn't licensed any content for the training data.
- galleywest200 3y agoAdobe is training off of images stored in their cloud systems, per their Terms of Service. OpenAI has provided no such documentation or legal guarantees, and it is still quite possible they scraped all sorts of copyright materials.
- devmor 3y agoThere is in fact, an extreme amount of circumstantial evidence that they intentionally and knowingly violated copyright en mass. It’s been quite a popular subject in tech news the past couple weeks.
- Kuinox 3y ago> OpenAI has provided no such documentation OpenAI and Shutterstocks publicly announced their collaboration, Shutterstocks sells AI generated images, generated with OpenAI models.
- luma 3y agoGoogle scrapes copyrighted material every day and then presents that material to users in the form of excerpts, images, and entire book pages. This has been ruled OK by the courts. Scraping copyrighted information is not illegal or we couldn't have search engines.
- Kuinox 3y ago> More specifically, we assume the attacker: > • can inject a small number of poison data (image/text pairs) to the model’s training dataset I think thoes are bad assumption, labelling is more and more done by some labelling AI.
- freeone3000 3y agoUsually clip, which is actually how this works — the examples are modified to be misclassified in clip, but look passable to a human.
- popohauer 3y agoI'm glad to see tools like Nightshade starting to pop up to protect the real life creativity of artists. I like AI art, but I do feel conflicted about its potential long term effects towards a society that no longer values authentic creativity.
- Minor49er 3y agoIs the existence of the AI tool not itself a product of authentic creativity? Does eliminating barriers to image generation not facilitate authentic creativity?
- 23B1 3y agoNo, it facilitates commoditization. Art – real art – is fundamentally a human-to-human transaction. Once everyone can fire perfectly-rendered perfectly-unique pieces of 'art' at each other, it'll just become like the internet is today: filled with extremely low-value noise. Enjoy the short term novelty while you can.
- fulladder 3y agoThis is the right prediction. Once machines can generate visual art, people will simply stop valuing it. We may see increased interest in other forms of art, e.g., live performance art like theater. It's hard to predict exactly how it'll play out, but once something becomes cheap to produce and widely available, it loses its luster for connoisseurs and then gradually loses its luster for everybody else too.
- BeFlatXIII 3y ago> Art – real art – is fundamentally a human-to-human transaction. Why is this hippie nonsense so popular?
- 23B1 3y agoBecause some things are different than others, even though they might have the same word to describe them.
- eddd-ddde 3y agoIsn't this just teaching the models how to better understand pictures as humans do? As long as you feed them content that looks good to a human, wouldn't they improve in creating such content?
- lern_too_spel 3y agoYou would think the economists at UChicago would have told these researchers that their tool would achieve the opposite effect of what they intended, but here we are. In this case, the mechanism for how it would work is effectively useless. It doesn't affect OpenAI or other companies building foundation models. It only works on people fine-tuning these foundation models, and only if the image is glazed to affect the same foundation model.
- k__ 3y agoHow long will this work?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kevingadd 3y agoIt's an arms race the bigger players will win, and it undermines the quality of the images. But it feels natural that artists would want to do something since they don't feel like anyone else is protecting them right now.
- devmor 3y agoBaffling to see anyone argue against this technology when it is a non-issue to any model by simply acquiring only training data you have permission to use.
- notfed 3y agoI don't know if asking permission of every copyright holder of every image on the Internet is as simple as you're implying.
- krapp 3y agoThe reason people are arguing against this technology is that no one is using them in the way you describe. They actually wouldn't even be economically viable in that case.
- devmor 3y agoIf it is not economically viable for you to be ethical, then you do not deserve economic success. Anyone arguing against this technology following the line of reasoning you present is operating in adverse to the good of society. Especially if their only motive is economic viability.
- Ukv 3y agoI think people 100% have the right to use this on their images, but: > simply acquiring only training data you have permission to use Currently it's generally infeasible to obtain licenses at the required scale. When attempting to develop a model that can describe photos for visually impaired users, I had even tried to reach out to obtain a license from Getty. They repeatedly told me that they don't license images for machine learning[0]. I think it's easy to say "well too bad, it doesn't deserve to exist" if you're just thinking about DALL-E 3, but there's a huge number of positive and far less-controversial applications of machine learning that benefit from web-scale pretraining and foundation models - spam filtering, tumour segmentation, voice transcription, language translation, defect detection, etc. [0]: https://i.imgur.com/iER0BE2.png https://i.imgur.com/iER0BE2.png
- ultimoo 3y agowould it have been that hard to include a sample photo and how it looks with the nightshade filter side by side in a 3 page document describing how it would look in great detail
- jamesu 3y agoLong-term I think the real problem for artists will be corporations generating their own high quality targeted datasets from a cheap labor pool, completely outcompeting them by a landslide.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ufocia 3y agoIt will democratize art.
- 23B1 3y agothen it won't be art anymore, it'll just be mountains of shit sorta like what the laptop did for writing
- jrflowers 3y agoThis is a good point. There hasn’t been any writing since the release of the Gateway Solo in 1995
- sussmannbaka 3y agoArt is already democratized. It has been for decades. Everyone can pick it up at zero cost. Even you! The poorest people have historically produced great art. Training a model, however? Expensive. Running it locally? Expensive. Paying the sub? Expensive. Nothing is being democratized, the only thing this does is devaluing the blood and sweat people have put into their work so FAANG can sell it to lazy suckers.
- int_19h 3y agoTime is not a zero cost thing, and especially not for the poorest people.
- jdietrich 3y agoIn the short-to-medium term, we're seeing huge improvements in the data efficiency of generative models. We haven't really started to see self-training in diffusion models, which could improve data efficiency by orders of magnitude. Current models are good at generalisation and are getting better at an incredible pace, so any efforts to limit the progress of AI by restricting access to training data is a speedbump rather than a roadblock.
- msp26 3y ago>Like Glaze, Nightshade is computed as a multi-objective optimization that minimizes visible changes to the original image. It's still noticeably visible.
- kevingadd 3y agoYeah, I've seen multiple artists complain about how glazing reduces image quality. It's very noticeable. That seems like an unavoidable problem given how AI is trained on images right now.
- dist-epoch 3y agoRemember when the music industry tried to use technology to stop music pirating? This will work about as well... Oh, I forget, fighting music pirating was considered an evil thing to do on HN. "pirating is not stealing, is copyright infringement", right? Unlike training neural nets on internet content which of course is "stealing".
- xigoi 3y agoThe difference is that “pirating” is mostly done by individuals for private use, whereas training is mostly done by megacorporations looking to make more money.
- kevingadd 3y agoFWIW, you're the only use of the word "steal" in this comment thread. Many people would in fact argue that training AI on people's art without permission is copyright infringement, since the thing it (according to detractors) does is infringe copyright by generating knockoffs of people's work. You will see some people use the term "stealing" but they're usually referring to how these AIs are sold/operated by for-profit companies that want to make money off artists' work without compensating them. I think it's not unreasonable to call that "stealing" even if the legal definition doesn't necessarily fit 100%. The music industry is also not really a very good comparison point for independent artists... there is no Big Art equivalent that has a stranglehold on the legislature and judiciary like the RIAA/MPAA do.
- snakeyjake 3y agoA more apt comparison is sampling. AI is sampling other's works. Musicians can and do sample. They also obtain clearance for commercial works, pay royalties if required, AND credit the samples if required. AI "art" does none of that.
- Minor49er 3y agoMusicians overwhelmingly do not even attempt to clear samples. This also isn't a great comparison since samples are taken directly out of the audio, not turned into a part of a pattern used to generate new sounds like what AI generators do with images
- 542458 3y agoThis seems to introduce levels of artifacts that many artists would find unacceptable: https://twitter.com/sini4ka111/status/1748378223291912567 https://twitter.com/sini4ka111/status/1748378223291912567 The rumblings I'm hearing are that this a) barely works with last-gen training processes b) does not work at all with more modern training processes (GPT-4V, LLaVA, even BLIP2 labelling [1]) and c) would not be especially challenging to mitigate against even should it become more effective and popular. The Authors' previous work, Glaze, also does not seem to be very effective despite dramatic proclamations to the contrary, so I think this might be a case of overhyping an academically interesting but real-world-impractical result. [1]: Courtesy of /u/b3sn0w on Reddit: https://imgur.com/cI7RLAq https://imgur.com/cI7RLAq https://imgur.com/eqe3Dyn https://imgur.com/eqe3Dyn https://imgur.com/1BMASL4 https://imgur.com/1BMASL4
- brucethemoose2 3y agoYeah. At worst a simple img2img diffusion step would mitigate this, but just eyeballing the examples, traditional denoisers would probably do the job? Denoising is probably a good preprocessing step anyway.
- achileas 3y agoIt’s a common preprocessing step and I believe that’s how glaze (this lab’s previous work) was defeated.
- gedy 3y agoMaybe it's more about "protecting" images that artists want to publicly share to advertise work, but it's not appropriate for final digital media, etc.
- sesm 3y agoIn short, anti-AI watermark.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
- Albert931 3y agoArtist are now fully dependent on Software Engineers for protecting the future of their career lol
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- DueDilligence 3y ago[dead]
- TenJack 3y agoWonder if the AI companies are already so far ahead that they can use their AI to detect and avoid any poisoning?
- alentred 3y agoWith this "solution" it looks like the world of art enters the cat-and-mouse game the ad blockers were playing for the last decade or two.
- isodev 3y agoI just tested it with Azure AI image classification and it worked - so this cat is yet to adapt to the mouse’s latest idea. I still feel it is absolutely wrong to roam around the internet and scrape images (without consent) in order to power one’s cash cow AI. I hope more methods to protect artworks (including audio and other formats) become more accessible.
- HKH2 3y agoArtists copy from each other all the time. Arguably, culture exists because of copying (folk stories by necessity); copyright makes culture top-down and stagnant, and you can't avoid it because they have the money to shove it right in your face. Who wants trickle-down culture?
- KTibow 3y agoI might be missing something because I don't know much about the architecture of either Nightshade or AI art generators, but I wonder if you could try to have a GAN-like architecture (an extra model trying to trick the model) for the part of the generator that labels images to build resistance to Nightshade-like filters.
- ukuina 3y agoWon't a simple downsample->upsample be the antidote?
- xg15 3y agoI wonder how this tool works if it's actually model independent. My understanding so far was that in principle each possible model has some set of pathological inputs for which the classification will be different than what a user sees - but that this set is basically different for each model. So did they actually manage to build an "universal" poison? If yes, how?
- freeone3000 3y agoIt misclassifies objects in clip, which is used for label generation.
- peter_d_sherman 3y agoTo protect an individual's image property rights from image generating AI's -- wouldn't it be simpler for the IETF (or other standards-producing group) to simply create an AI image exclusion standard , similar to "robots.txt" -- which would tell an AI data-gathering web crawler that a given image or set of images -- was off-limits for use as data? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt https://www.ietf.org/ https://www.ietf.org/
- potatolicious 3y agoEntities training models have no incentive to follow such metadata. If we accept the premise that "more input -> better models" then there's every reason to ignore non-legally-binding metadata requests. Robots.txt survived because the use of it to gatekeep valuable goodies was never widespread. Most sites want to be indexed, most URLs excluded by the robots file are not of interest to the search engine anyway, and use of robots to prevent crawling actually interesting pages is marginal. If there was ever genuine uptake in using robots to gatekeep the really good stuff search engines would've stopped respecting it pretty much immediately - it isn't legally binding after all.
- peter_d_sherman 3y ago>Entities training models have no incentive to follow such metadata. If we accept the premise that "more input -> better models" then there's every reason to ignore non-legally-binding metadata requests. Name two entities that were asked to stop using a given individuals' images that failed to stop using them after the stop request was issued. >Robots.txt survived because the use of it to gatekeep valuable goodies was never widespread. Most sites want to be indexed, most URLs excluded by the robots file are not of interest to the search engine anyway, and use of robots to prevent crawling actually interesting pages is marginal. Robots.txt survived because it was a "digital signpost" a "digital sign" -- sort of like the way you might put a "Private Property -- No Trespassing" sign in your yard. Most moral/ethical/lawful people -- will obey that sign. Some might not. But the some that might not -- probably constitute about a 0.000001% minority of the population, whereas the majority that do -- probably constitute about 99.99999% of the population. "Robots.txt" is a sign -- much like a road sign is. People can obey them -- or they can ignore them -- but they can ignore them only at their own peril! It's a sign which provides a hint for what the right thing to do in a certain set of circumstances -- which is what the Law is; which is what the majority of Laws are. People can obey them -- or they can choose to ignore them -- but only at their own peril! Most will choose to obey them. Most will choose to "take the hint", proverbially speaking! A few might not -- but that doesn't mean the majority won't! >If there was ever genuine uptake in using robots to gatekeep the really good stuff search engines would've stopped respecting it pretty much immediately - it isn't legally binding after all. Again, name two entities that were asked to stop using a given individuals' images that failed to stop using them after the stop request was issued.
- GaggiX 3y agoThese methods like Glaze usually works by taking the original image chaging the style or content and then apply LPIPS loss on an image encoder, the hope is that if they can deceive a CLIP image encoder it would confuse also other models with different architecture, size and dataset, while changing the original image as little as possible so it's not too noticeable to a human eye. To be honest I don't think it's a very robust technique, with this one they claim that a model instead of seeing for example a cow on grass the model will see a handbag, if someone has access to GPT4-V I want to see if it's able to deceive actually big image encoders (usually more aligned to the human vision). EDIT: I have seen a few examples with GPT-4 V and how I imagine it wasn't deceived, I doubt this technique can have any impact on the quality of the models, the only impact that this could potentially have honestly is to make the training more robust.
- garg 3y agoEach time there is an update to training algorithms and in response poisoning algorithms, artists will have to re-glaze, re-mist, and re-nightshade all their images? Eventually I assume the poisoning artifacts introduced in the images will be very visible to humans as well.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoWhat the article doesn't illustrate is that it destroys fine detail in the image, even in the thumbnails of the reference paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.13828.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.13828.pdf Also... Maybe I am naive, but it seems rather trivial to work around with a quick prefilter? I don't know if tradition denoising would be enough, but worst case you could run img2img diffusion. reply
- GaryNumanVevo 3y agoThe poisoned images aren't intended to be viewed, rather scraped and pass a basic human screen. You wouldn't be able to denoise as you'd have to denoise the entire dataset, the entire point is that these are virtually undetectable from typical training set examples, but they can push prompt frequencies around at will with a small number of poisoned examples.
- minimaxir 3y ago> You wouldn't be able to denoise as you'd have to denoise the entire dataset Doing that requires much less compute than training a large generative image model.
- GaryNumanVevo 3y ago> the entire point is that these are virtually undetectable from typical training set examples I'll repeat this point for clarity. After going over the paper again, denoising shouldn't affect this attack, it's the ability of plausible images to not be detected by human or AI discriminators (yet)
- brucethemoose2 3y agoI guess the idea is that the model trainers are ignorant of this and wouldn't know to preprocess/wouldn't bother? That's actually quite plausible.
- BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
- enord 3y agoI’m completely flabbergasted by the number of comments implying copyright concepts such as “fair use” or “derivative work” apply to trained ML models. Copyright is for _people_, as are the entailing rights, responsibilities and exemptions. This has gone far beyond anthropomorphising and we need to like get it together, man!
- ronsor 3y agoYou act like computers and ML models aren't just tools used by people.
- enord 3y agoWhat did I write to give you that impression?
- Ukv 3y agoMy initial interpretation was that you're saying fair use is irrelevant to the situation because machine learning models aren't themselves legal persons. But, fair use doesn't solely apply to manual creation - use of traditional algorithms (e.g: the snippets, caching, and thumbnailing done by search engines) is still covered by fair use. To my understanding, that's why ronsor pointed out that ML models are tools used by people (and those people can give a fair use defense). Possibly you instead meant that fair use is relevant, but people are wording remarks in a way that suggests the model itself is giving a fair use defence to copyright infringement, rather than the persons training or using it?
- enord 3y agoWell then I could have been much clearer because I meant something like the latter. An ML model can neither have nor be in breach of copyright so any discussion about how it works, and how that relates to how people work or “learn” is besides the point. What actually matters is firstly details about collation of source material, and later the particular legal details surrounding attribution. The last part involves breaking new ground legally speaking and IANAL so I will reserve judgement. The first part, collation of source material for training is emphatically not unexplored legal or moral territory. People are acting like none of the established processes apply in the case of LLMs and handwave about “learning” to defend it.
- MarcoZavala 3y ago[dead]
- tigrezno 3y agoDo not fight the AI, it's a lost cause, embrace it.
- gweinberg 3y agoFor this to work, wouldn't you have to have an enormous number of artists collaborating on "poisoning" their images the same way (cow to handbag) while somehow keeping it secret form ai trainers that they were doing this? It seems to me that even if the technology works perfectly as intended, you're effectively just mislabeling a tiny fraction of the training data.
- Shemetz 3y ago1. They don't need an enormous number of artists; the research paper showed significant results with even 50 poisoned image samples in the dataset, which is enough to be contained in even a single artist's online gallery. 2. They don't need to keep it a secret; the goal is to remove these images from the training data, in a way that would be much more efficient than simply adding a "please don't include my art in your ai scraper" message next to your pictures.
- ang_cire 3y agoSetting aside the efficacy of this tool, I would be very interested in the legal implications of putting designs in your art that could corrupt ML models. For instance, if I set traps in my home which hurt an intruder we are both guilty of crimes (traps are illegal and are never considered self defense, B&E is illegal). Would I be responsible for corrupting the AI operator's data if I intentionally include adversarial artifacts to corrupt models, or is that just DRM to legally protect my art from infringement? edit: I replied to someone else, but this is probably good context: DRM is legally allowed to disable or even corrupt the software or media that it is protecting, if it detects misuse. If an adversarial-AI tool attacks the model, it then becomes a question of whether the model, having now incorporated my protected art, is now "mine" to disable/corrupt, or whether it is in fact out of bounds of DRM. So for instance, a court could say that the adversarial-AI methods could only actively prevent the training software from incorporating the protected media into a model, but could not corrupt the model itself.
- anigbrowl 3y agoNone whatsoever. There is no right to good data for model training, nor does any contractual relationship exist between you and and a model builder who scrapes your website.
- ang_cire 3y agoIf you're assuming this is open-shut, you're wrong. I asked this specifically as someone who works in security. A court is going to have to decide where the line is between DRM and malware in adversarial-AI tools.
- ufocia 3y agoWorth trying but I doubt it unless we establish a right to train.
- anigbrowl 3y agoI'm not. Malware is one thin, passive data poisoning is another. Mapmakers have long used such devices to detect/deter unwanted copying. In the US such 'trap streets' are not protected by copyright, but nor do they generate liability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
- etchalon 3y agoMy hope is these type of "poisoning tools" become ubiquitous for all content types on the web, forcing AI companies to, you know, license things.
- mjfl 3y agoAnother way would be, for every 1 piece of art you make, post 10 AI generated arts, so that the SNR is really bad.
- Duanemclemore 3y agoFor visual artists who don't want visible artifacting in the art they feature online, would it be possible to upload these alongside your un-poisoned art, but have them only hanging out in the background? So say having one proper copy and a hundred poisoned copies in the same server, but only showing the un-poisoned one? Might this "flood the zone" approach also have -some- efficacy against human copycats?
- marcinzm 3y agoThis feels like it'll actually help make AI models better versus worse once they train on these images. Artists are basically, for free, creating training data that conveys what types of noise does not change the intended meaning of the image to the artist themselves.
- r3trohack3r 3y agoThe number of people who are going to be able to produce high fidelity art with off the shelf tools in the near future is unbelievable. It’s pretty exciting. Being able to find a mix of styles you like and apply them to new subjects to make your own unique, personalized, artwork sounds like a wickedly cool power to give to billions of people.
- __loam 3y agoAnd we only had to alienate millions of people from their labor to do it.
- DennisAleynikov 3y agoYeah, sadly those millions of people don’t matter in the grand scheme of things and were never going to profit off their work long term
- r3trohack3r 3y agoWhat a bummer of a thing to say. Those millions/billions of people matter a great deal.
- DennisAleynikov 3y agoThey matter but not under the current system. Artists are a rarely paid profession, and there are professional artists out there but there’s now a huge amount of people that will never contact an artist for work that used to only be human powered. It’s not personal for me. I understand that desire to resist the inevitable but it’s here now. For what it’s worth I never use midjourney or dalle or any of the commercial closed systems that steal from artists but I know I can’t stop the masses from going there and inputting “give me pretty picture in style x”
- __loam 3y agoResistance is important imo. If this happens and we, who work in this industry, say nothing, what good are we. It's only inevitable if it's socially acceptable.
- efitz 3y agoThis is the DRM problem again. However much we might wish that it was not true, ideas are not rivalrous. If you share an idea with another person, they now have that idea too. If you share words on paper, then someone with eyes and a brain might memorize them (or much more likely, just grasp and retain the ideas conveyed in the words). If you let someone hear your music, then the ideas (phrasing, style, melody, etc) in that music are transferred. If you let people see a visual work, then the stylistic and content elements of that work are potentially absorbed by the audience. We have copyright to protect specific embodiments, but mostly if you try to share ideas with others without letting them use the ideas you shared, then you are in for a life of frustration and escalating arms race. I completely sympathize with anyone who had a great idea and spent a lot of effort to realize it. If I invented/created something awesome I would be hurt and angry if someone “copied” it. But the hard cold reality is that you cannot “own” an idea.
- tsujamin 3y agoBeing able to fairly monetise your creative work and put food on the table is a bit rivalrous though, don’t you think?
- efitz 3y agoNo, I disagree. There is no principle of the universe or across human civilizations that says that you have a right to eat because you produced a creative work. The way societies work is that the members of the society contribute and benefit in prescribed ways. Societies with lots of excess production may at times choose to allow creative works to be monetized. Societies without much surplus are extremely unlikely to do so, eg a society with not enough food for everyone to eat in the middle of a famine is extremely unlikely to feed people who only create art; those people will have to contribute in some other way. I think it is a very modern western idea (less than a century old) that many artists can dedicate themselves solely to producing the art they want to produce. In all other times artists either had day jobs or worked on commission.
- jrflowers 3y ago
- gfodor 3y agoHuge market for snake oil here. There is no way that such tools will ever win, given the requirements the art remain viewable to human perception, so even if you made something that worked (which this sounds like it doesn’t) from first principles it will be worked around immediately. The only real way for artists or anyone really to try to hold back models from training on human outputs is through the law, ie, leveraging state backed violence to deter the things they don’t want. This too won’t be a perfect solution, if anything it will just put more incentives for people to develop decentralized training networks that “launder” the copyright violations that would allow for prosecutions. All in all it’s a losing battle at a minimum and a stupid battle at worst. We know these models can be created easily and so they will, eventually, since you can’t prevent a computer from observing images you want humans to be able to observe freely.
- AJ007 3y agoThe level of claims accompanied by enthusiastic reception from a technically illiterate audience make it sound, smell, and sound like snake oil without much deep investigation. There is another alternative to the law. Provide your art for private viewing only, and ensure your in person audience does not bring recording devices with them. That may sound absurd, but it's a common practice during activities like having sex.
- gfodor 3y agoTrue I can imagine that kind of thing becoming popular.
- Art9681 3y agoThis would just create a new market for art paparazzis who would find any and all means to inflitrate such private viewings with futuristic miniature cameras and other sensors and selling it for a premium. Less than 24 hours later the files end up on hundreds or thousands of centralized and decentralized servers. I'm not defending it. Just acknowledging the reality. The next TMZ for private art gatherings is percolating in someone's garage at the moment.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- k__ 3y agoWhat are LLMs that was trained with public domain content only? I would believe there is enough content out there to get reasonably good results.
- minimaxir 3y agoA few months ago I made a proof-of-concept on how finetuning Stable Diffusion XL on known bad/incoherent images can actually allow it to output "better" images if those images are used as a negative prompt, i.e. specifying a high-dimensional area of the latent space that model generation should stay away from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37211519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37211519 There's a nonzero chance that encouraging the creation of a large dataset of known tampered data can ironically improve generative AI art models by allowing the model to recognize tampered data and allow the training process to work around it.
- smrtinsert 3y agoGreat lora post, thanks for sharing this again! Not sure how I missed as I'm especially interested in sd content.
- squidbeak 3y agoI really don't understand the anxiety of artists towards AI - as if creatives haven't always borrowed and imitated. Every leading artist has had acolytes, and while it's true no artist ever had an acolyte as prodigiously productive as AI will be, I don't see anything different between a young artist looking to Picasso for cues and Stable Diffusion or DALL-E doing the same. Styles and methods haven't ever been subject to copyright - and art would die the moment that changed. The only explanation I can find for this backlash is that artists are actually worried just like the rest of us that pretty soon AI will produce higher quality more inventive work faster and more imaginatively than they can - which is very natural, but not a reason to inhibit an AI's creative education.
- beepbooptheory 3y agoThis has been litigated over and over again, and there have been plenty of good points made and concerns raised over it by those who it actually affects. It seems a little bit disingenuous (especially in this forum) to say that that conclusion is the "only explanation" you can come up with. And just to avoid prompting you too much: trust me, we all know or can guess why you think AI art is a good thing regardless of any concerns one might bring up.
- jwells89 3y agoImitation isn’t the problem so much as it is that ML generated images are composed of a mush of the images it was trained on. A human artist can abstract the concepts underpinning a style and mimic it by drawing all-new lineart, coloration, shading, composition, etc, while the ML model has to lean on blending training imagery together. Furthermore there’s a sort of unavoidable “jitter” in human-produced art that varies between individuals that stems from vastly different ways of thinking, perception of the world, mental abstraction processes, life experiences, etc. This is why artists who start out imitating other artists almost always develop their imitations into a style all their own — the imitations were already appreciably different from the original due to the aforementioned biases and those distinctions only grow with time and experimentation. There would be greatly reduced moral controversy surrounding ML models if they lacked that mincemeat/pink slime aspect.
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- will5421 3y agoI think the artists need to agree to stop making art altogether. That ought to get people’s attention. Then the AI people might (be socially pressured or legally forced to) put their tools away.
- CatWChainsaw 3y agoNo, they'll just demand that artists produce more art so they can continue scraping, because if you work in tech you're allowed to be entitled, you're The Face Of The Future and all you're trying to do is Save The World, all these decels are just obstacles to be destroyed.
- Zetobal 3y agoWell, at least for sdxl it's not working neither in LoRa nor dreambooth finetunes.
- chris-orgmenta 3y agoI want progressive fees on copyright/IP/patent usage, and worldwide gov cooperation/legislation (and perhaps even worldwide ability to use works without obtaining initial permission, although let's not go into that outlandish stuff) I want a scaling license fee to apply (e.g. % pegged to revenue. This still has an indirect problem with different industries having different profit margins, but still seems the fairest). And I want the world (or EU, then others to follow suit) to slowly reduce copyright to 0 years* after artists death if owned by a person, and 20-30 years max if owned by a corporation. And I want the penalties for not declaring usage** / not paying fees, to be incredibly high for corporations... 50% gross (harder) / net (easier) profit margin for the year? Something that isn't a slap on the wrist and can't be wriggled out of quite so easily, and is actually an incentive not to steal in the first place.) [*]or whatever society deems appropriate. [**]Until auto-detection (for better or worse) gets good enough. IMO that would allow personal use, encourages new entrants to market, encourages innovation, incentivises better behaviour from OpenAI et al.
- Dylan16807 3y ago> And I want the world (or EU, then others to follow suit) to slowly reduce copyright to 0 years* after artists death if owned by a person, and 20-30 years max if owned by a corporation. Why death at all? It's icky to trigger soon after death, it's bad to have copyright vary so much based on author age, and it's bad for many works to still have huge copyright lengths. It's perfectly fine to let copyright expire during the author's life. 20-30 years for everything.
- wraptile 3y agoExtremely naive to think that any of this could be enforced to any adequate level. Copyright is fundamentally broken and putting some plasters on it is not going to do much especially when these plasters are several decades too late.
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- whywhywhywhy 3y agoWhy are there no examples?
- arisAlexis 3y agoWouldn't this be applicable to text too?
- matteoraso 3y agoToo little, too late. There's already very large high quality datasets to train AI art generators.
- eigenvalue 3y agoThis seems like a pretty pointless "arms race" or "cat and mouse game". People who want to train generative image models and who don't care about what artists think about it at all can just do some basic post-processing on the images that is just enough to destroy the very carefully tuned changes this Nightshade algorithm makes. Something like resampling it to slightly lower resolution and then using another super-resolution model on it to upsample it again would probably be able to destroy these subtle tweaks without making a big difference to a human observer. In the future, my guess is that courts will generally be on the side of artists because of societal pressures, and artists will be able to challenge any image they find and have it sent to yet another ML model that can quickly adjudicate whether the generated image is "too similar" to the artist's style (which would also need to be dissimilar enough from everyone else's style to give a reasonable legal claim in the first place). Or maybe artists will just give up on trying to monetize the images themselves and focus only on creating physical artifacts, similar to how independent musicians make most of their money nowadays from touring and selling merchandise at shows (plus Patreon). Who knows? It's hard to predict the future when there are such huge fundamental changes that happen so quickly!
- hackernewds 3y agothe point is you could circumvent one nightshade, but as long as the cat and mouse game continues there can be more
- johnnyanmac 3y ago>Or maybe artists will just give up on trying to monetize the images themselves and focus only on creating physical artifacts, similar to how independent musicians make most of their money nowadays from touring and selling merchandise at shows (plus Patreon). As is, art already isn't a sustainable career for most people who can't get a job in industry. The most common monetization is either commissions or hiding extra content behind a pay wall. To be honest I can see more proverbial "Furry artists" sprouting up in a cynical timeline. I imagine like every other big tech that the 18+ side of this will be clamped down hard by the various powers that be. Which means NSFW stuff will be shielded a bit by the advancement and you either need to find underground training models or go back to an artist. .
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- jdeaton 3y agoSounds like free adversarial data augmentation.
- Devasta 3y agoDelighted to see it. Fuck AI art.
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- tbalsam 3y ago[flagged]
- BadHumans 3y agoI'm not sold on your argument. I'm not an artist but I don't see how an artist using Nightshade is breaking the law. From an anti-AI point of view, you illegally took my artwork and used it. How is it my fault you didn't understand what you were stealing?
- tbalsam 3y agoCurrently it's not legally defined what is stealing and what is fair use with respect to this, which is of course why k feel it is such a strong issue, however, poisoning data and intentionally masking it to hide said poisoning is rather blatantly illegal. Rather clearly I think most people support individual IP protection and that's not really a contested issue, however what is fair use and where things fall in that gray area is where things do get dicey.
- thethimble 3y agoI wonder how your original claim balances with something like freedom of speech/expression? Ultimately it’s art and perhaps the Nightshade-modified version is a component of what makes the piece art?
- tbalsam 3y agoNightshade is intended to make minimal changes so I think that might be one argument though a difficult sell to some. The original post is mainly about the current legality, I'm torn as to what the moral balance is, but poisoning data is similar to a lot of historical asymmetrical methods of topical influence through intentional property destruction, and that's an issue. For example, the counterintuitive example of you poisoning a sandwich if your coworker is eating it makes you liable even if the original action is wrong on the coworker's part, if that makes sense. It's not necessarily an intuitive legal construct but a necessary one at least. That said, I think w.r.t. a final solution, grassroots vs big money legal will be the long-term playing field and I think efforts would be well spent on that. Though I worry about the perceived desperation of the field if people are this ready to poison open-field data in order to protect what they determine their own interests to be. I think that's the big marker here that we should look at and be worried about, usually when ignored that tends to preclude different types of issues/problems.
- aussieguy1234 3y agoThe image generation models now are at the point where they can produce their own synthetic training images. So I'm not sure how big of an impact something like this would have.
- matt3210 3y agoPut a TOC on all your content that says “by using my content for AI you agree to pay X per image” and then send them a bill once you see it in an AI.
- wruza 3y agoOnce you see what exactly? “AI” isn’t some image filter from the early 2000s.
- paul7986 3y agoAny AI art/video/photography/music/etc generator company who generates revenue needs to add watermarks to let the public know its AI generator. This should be forced via legislation in all countries. If they don't then whatever social network or other services where things can shared/viewed by large groups to millions & are posted publicly need to be labeled "We can not verify veracity of this content." I want a real internet ..this AI stuff is just triple fold increasing fake crap on the Internet and in turn / time our trust in it!
- mmaunder 3y agoTrying to convince an AI it sees something and a human they don’t is probably a losing battle.
- consoleable 3y agoThe naive idea of wanting to protect artists is actually protecting the monopoly of big companies. Some projects against this behavior: https://github.com/syncblob/Obey-AI-Luddites https://github.com/syncblob/Obey-AI-Luddites
- ngneer 3y agoI love it. This undermines the notion of ground truth. What separates correct information from incorrect information? Maybe nothing! I love how they acknowledge the never ending attack versus defense game. In stark contrast to "our AI will solve all your problems".
- 24karrotts_ 3y agoIf you decrease quality of art, you give AI all the advantage in the market.
- iLoveOncall 3y agoI wonder if this is illegal in some countries. In France for example, there is the following law: "Obstructing or distorting the operation of an automated data processing system is punishable by five years' imprisonment and a fine of €150,000.". If you ask me, this is 100% applicable in this case, so I wonder what a judge would rule.
- snerc 3y agoI wonder if we know enough about any of these systems to make such claims. This is all predicated on the fact that this tool will be in widespread use. If it is somehow widely used beyond the folks who have seen it at the top of HN, won't the big firms have countermeasures, ready to deploy?
- nnevatie 3y agoThe intention is good, from an AI-opponent's perspective. I don't think will work practically, though. The drawbacks for actual users of the image galleries, plus the level of complexity involved in poisoning the samples makes this unfeasible to implement at the scale required.
- ThinkBeat 3y agoIn so far as anger goes against AIs being trained on particular intellectual properties. A made up scenario¹ is that a person who is training an AI, goes to the local library and checks out 600 books on art. The person then lets the AI read all of them. After which they are returned to the library and another 600 books are borrowed Then we can imagine the AI somehow visiting a lot of museums and galleries. The AI will now have been trained on the style and looks of a lot of art from different artists All the material has been obtained in a legal manner. Is this an acceptable use? Or can an artist still assert that the AI was trained with their IP without consent? Clearly this is one of the ways a human would go about learning about styles, techniques etc.. ¹ Yes you probably cannot borrow 600 books at a time. How does the AI read the books? I dont know. Simplicity would be that the researcher takes a photo of each page. This would be extremmly slow but for this hypothetical it is acceptable.
- nanofus 3y agoI think the key difference here is that the most prominent image generation AIs are commercial and for-profit. The scenarios you describe are comparing a commercial AI to a private person. You cannot get a library card for a company, and you cannot bring a photography crew to a gallery without permission.
- daedlanth 3y ago[dead]
- drdrek 3y agoOnly protection is adding giant gaping vaginas to your art, nothing less will deter scraping. If the Email spam community showed us something in the last 40 years is that no amount of defensive tech measures will work except financial disincentives.
- rvba 3y agoThe opening website is so poor - "what is nightshade" - then a whole paragraph that tells nothing, then another paragraph.. then no examples. This whole description should be reworked to be shorter and more to the point.
- paulsutter 3y agoCute. The effectiveness of any technique like this will be short-lived. What we really need is clarification of the extent that copyright protection extends to similar works. Most likely from an AI analysis of case law.
- fennecfoxy 3y agoI find the AI training topic interesting, because it's really data/information that is involved. Forget about the fact that it's images or stories or Reddit posts, it's all data. We are born and then exposed to the torrent of data from the world around us, mostly fed to us by other humans, this is what models are trying to tap. Unfortunately our learning process is completely organic and takes decades and decades and decades; there's no way to put a model through this easily. Perhaps we need to seed the web with AI agents who converse and learn as much like regular human beings as possible and assemble the dataset that way. Although having an agent browse and find an image to learn to draw from is still gonna make people reee even if that's exactly what a young and aspiring human artist would be doing. Don't talk about humans being sacred; we already voted to let corporations be people, for the 1% to exist and "lobby", breaking our democracy so that they can get tax breaks and make corrupt under the table deals. None of us stopped that from happening...
- Aeolun 3y agoHow is there not a single example on that website?