Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 710 posts

Re: Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

#271

Post by withinboredom »

stale2002 wrote: post #232
withinboredom wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making a profit off variations of someone's work isn't covered under fair use.

Gotcha. I wasn't talking about someone creating and selling copies of someone else's work, fortunately. So my point stands and your completely is in agreement with me that people are allowed to learn from other people's works. If someone wants to learn from someone else's work, that is completely legal no matter the licensing terms. Instead, it is only distributing copies that is not allowed.

AI isn't a human. It isn't "learning"; instead, it's encoding data so that it may be reproduced in combination with other things it has encoded.

If I paint a painting in the style of Monet, then I would give that person attribution by stating that. Monet may have never painted my artwork, but it's still based on that person's work. If I paint anything, I can usually point to everything that inspired me to do so. AI can't do that (yet) and thus has no idea what it is doing. It is a printer that prints random parts of people's works with no attribution. And finally, it is distributing them to it's owner's customers.

I actually hope that true AI comes to fruition at some point; when that happens I would be arguing the exact opposite. We don't have that yet, so this is just literally printing variations of other people's work. Don't believe me, try running an AI without training it on other people's work!

Re: Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

#272

Post by filleduchaos »

AJ007 wrote: post #266
GaryNumanVevo wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nightshaded images aren't intended for portfolios. They're mean to be uploaded enmasse and scraped later.

To where? A place no one sees them and they aren't scraped?

I think the point is that they're akin to a watermark.

Even before the current AI boom, plenty of artists have wanted to showcase their work/prove that it exists without necessarily making the highest quality original file public.

Re: Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

#273

Post by CaptainFever »

withinboredom wrote: post #155
deeviant wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the artists should still have the right to refuse their art being studies. Why? That certainly isn't a right spelled out in either patents or copyrights, both of which are supposed to support the development of arts and technology, not hinder it. If I discover a new mathematical formula, musical scale, or whatnot, should I be able to prevent others from learning about it?

It’s called a license and you can make it almost anything. It doesn’t even need to be spelled out, it can be verbal: “no, I won’t let you have it” It’s yours. That’s literally what copyright is there to enforce.

License doesn't matter if fair use applies.

> Fair use allows reproduction and other uses of copyrighted works – without requiring permission from the copyright owner – under certain conditions. In many cases, you can use copyrighted materials for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship or research.

Reminder that you can't own ideas, no matter what the law says.

NOTE: This comment is copyrighted and provided to you under license only. By reading this comment, you agree to give me 5 billion dollars.

Re: Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

#274

Post by gfodor »

AJ007 wrote: post #267
gfodor wrote: post #175

Huge 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, levera…

The 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…

True I can imagine that kind of thing becoming popular.

Re: Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

#275

Post by CaptainFever »

ang_cire wrote: post #119

Setting 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 adversaria…

Japan is considering it, I think? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38615280

Re: Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

#276

Post by gwbas1c »

throwoutway wrote: post #185
efitz wrote: post #172

This 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)…

I don't see the parallel between this offensive tool and DRM. I could, say buy a perpetual license to an image from the artist, so that I can print it and put it on my wall, while it can simultaneously be poisonous to an AI system. I can even steal it and print it, while it is still poisonous to an AI system. The closest parallel I can think of is that humans can ingest chocolate but dogs should not.

It's about the arm's race: DRM will always be cracked (with a sufficiently motivated customer.) AI poisoning will always be cracked (with a sufficiently motivated crawler.)

Re: Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

#277

Post by meowkit »

xpe wrote: post #237
efitz wrote: post #172

This 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)…

> But the hard cold reality is that you cannot “own” an idea. The above comment is true about the properties of information, as explained via the lens of economics. [1] However, one ignores ownership as defined by various systems (including the rule of law and social conventions) at one's own peril. Such systems can also present a "hard cold reality" that can bankrupt or ostracize you. [1] Don't let the apparent conf…

There are other games in town.

But whatever game gives the most predictive power is going to win.

Re: Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

#278

Post by withinboredom »

CaptainFever wrote: post #273
withinboredom wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s called a license and you can make it almost anything. It doesn’t even need to be spelled out, it can be verbal: “no, I won’t let you have it” It’s yours. That’s literally what copyright is there to enforce.

License doesn't matter if fair use applies. > Fair use allows reproduction and other uses of copyrighted works – without requiring permission from the copyright owner – under certain conditions. In many cases, you can use copyrighted materials for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship or research. Reminder that you can't own ideas, no…

I'd love to see you try to enforce that license because it would only prove my point. You'd have to sue me; then I would point to the terms of service of this platform and point out that by using it, you have no license here.

Fair use though, only applies as a legal defense because someone asserts you stole their work. Then ONLY the court decides whether or not you used it under fair use. You don't get to make that decision; you just get to decide whether to try and use it as a defense.

Even if you actually did unfairly use copyrighted works, you would be stupid not to use that as a defense. Because maybe somebody on the jury agrees with you...

Re: Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

#279

Post by deadbeeves »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #249
deadbeeves wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tool improvements only apply a constant factor to the effectiveness of learning. Creating a generative model applies an unbounded factor to the effectiveness of learning because, as I said, the only limit is how much computing resources are available to humanity. If a single person was able to copy themselves at practically no cost and the copy retained all the knowledge of the original then the two situations would…

Right, but the 'unbounded factor' is irrelevant because the output will quickly trend into random noise. And only the most interesting top few million art pieces will actually attract the attention of any concrete individual. For a current example, there's already billions of man-hours worth of AI spam writing, indexed by Google, that is likely not actually read by even a single person on Earth.

Whether it's irrelevant is a matter of opinion. The fact remains that a machine being able to copy the artistic style of a human makes it so that anyone can produce output in the style of that human by just feeding the machine electricity. That inherently devalues the style the artist has painstakingly developed. If someone wants a piece of art in that artist's style they don't have to go to that artist, they just need to request the machine for what they want. Is the machine's output of low quality? Maybe. Will there be people for whom that low quality still makes them want to seek out the human? No doubt. It doesn't change the fact that the style is still devalued, nor that there exist artists who would want to prevent that.

Re: Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

#280

Post by xigoi »

Almondsetat wrote: post #238
__loam wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Publicly available doesn't mean you have a license to do whatever you like with the image. If I download an image and re-upload it to my own art station or sell prints of it, that is something I can physically do because the image is public, but I'm absolutely violating copyright.

That's not an unautharized copy, it's unauthorized distribution. By the same metric me seeing the image and copying it by hand is also unauthorized copy (or reproduction is you will)

IANAL, but I’m pretty sure copying an image by hand is copyright violation.
Post reply on HN