ARTISTS STRIKE BACK
New tool to protect work from the AI engines
PUT AN IMAGE on the internet, and there’s every chance a large AI model will come along and scrape it, copyright or not. Nightshade, a new anti-AI tool designed to stall the scraping process, amassed 250,000 downloads in the first five days of its release in January, perhaps proving how many artists are suffering from AI anxiety. It works by ‘poisoning’ the data, manipulating it to make images difficult for AI to process properly. Most of this data is invisible to the human eye, although images without much texture can show signs at the most aggressive settings.