I’ll be the first to admit it – I haven’t made any kind of art since compulsory art classes back in Year 8. Mostly because I have absolutely zero artistic talent. That said, I’ve always loved looking at other people’s work and admiring the skill that goes into it.
I was recently thinking about how artists are dealing with the rapid rise of AI image generators. Which then led me down a rabbit hole where I discovered a couple of fascinating tools created by researchers at the University of Chicago: Glaze and Nightshade.
Glaze: Putting a Smudge on AI’s Glasses
What I learned from my research: Glaze is essentially a way for artists to protect their personal style from being copied by AI.
At a high level, it works by making tiny changes to artwork (digital image), these changes are essentially undetectable to the human eye, but very visible and confusing to AI crawlers.
So if someone asks an AI to generate an image in the style of an artist who’s used Glaze, the result will be very different. The idea is that this makes copying an artist’s style more effort than it’s worth.
The best part is that Glaze is free and actively maintained. It honestly brought such a smile to my face when I read about this!
Nightshade: Smudge? More like Sabotage
Nightshade takes things a step further and honestly, it’s a little bit savage (in a good way).
Instead of just protecting artwork, Nightshade is designed to actively mess with AI training data. When an artist uses Nightshade, the image still looks normal to people, but the AI ‘sees’ something completely different.
For example, what looks like a red car to us might register as a brown cat to an AI crawler. If enough of these altered images end up in a training dataset, the AI can start getting genuinely confused – mixing up objects and producing unreliable results. Ultimately these leads to users losing trust in their AI ‘tool’ (devastating I know! Hehe).
AND, like Glaze, it is also free to use!!
Looking Ahead
Of course, nothing in tech stays effective forever. As AI models evolve, tools like Glaze and Nightshade may lose some of their impact. But then again, Glaze and Nightshade can continue to evolve too. Classic cat and mouse.
For the first time in a while, it feels like artists have some real agency – and some genuinely clever tools – when it comes to protecting their work in what is feeling like a world being saturated by AI.
Lastly, if you’re an artist looking for ways to share your work with actual humans, you might want to check out our friends over at I Am Human.
