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Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu

371–380 of 710 posts

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

#371
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, 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…

> There is no principle of the universe or across human civilizations Can you list the principles across human civilizations?

That doesn't follow; you can say an item is not in a set without writing out every member of that set. What principle do you claim exists to contradict that claim?

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

#372
post #355
post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who said anything about creating a derivative? Surely you don't mean to say that any image created with a model trained on copyrighted data counts as a derivative of it. Edit: Or worse, that the model itself is derivative, something so different from an image must count as transformative work!. Also who said anything about selling?

The model itself is a derivative. And it’s not really that transformative, it’s basically the input data compressed with highly lossy compression. > Also who said anything about selling? All the corporations that are offering AI as a paid service?

> it’s basically the input data compressed with highly lossy compression.

Okay, extract the images from a Stable Diffusion checkpoint then. I'll wait.

It's not like lossy compression CAN'T be fair use or transformative. I'm sure you can imagine how that is possible given the many ways an image can be processed.

> All the corporations that are offering AI as a paid service?

Am I them?

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

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, but I already look down on artists who refuse to integrate generative AI into their processes.

People who use generative AI in their processes are not artists.

This is true. They are just taking a sample from a generated latent space, just like taking a photo of something doesn't make you an artist.

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

#374
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s designed to restrict the purposes for which the consumer can use the work. It is exactly like DRM in this way.

To be clear, you can still train AI with these images. Nothing is stopping you.

To quote the source:

>Nightshade's goal is not to break models, but to increase the cost of training on unlicensed data, such that licensing images from their creators becomes a viable alternative.

Which feels similar to DRM. To discourage extraction of assets.

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

#375
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)…

Not everybody equates automated scraping for training models and human experience. Just like any other “data wants to be free” type of discussion, the philosophical and ethical considerations are anything but cut-and-dried, and they’re far more consequential than the technical and economics-in-a-vacuum ones. The general public will quite possibly see things differently than the “oh well, artists— that’s the free market for ya, and you lost” crowd.

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

#376
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to fairly monetise your creative work and put food on the table is a bit rivalrous though, don’t you think?

No, 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…

> 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.

What does that have to do with rivalry? This doesn't dispute the idea that AI is indeed competing with artists. You're just saying artists don't deserve to get paid.

Regardless, some artists will give up but some will simply be more careful with where and how they post their art with tools like these. AI doesn't have a right to the artist's images neither.

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

#378
post #48

This seems to introduce levels of artifacts that many artists would find unacceptable: 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…

The screenshots you sent in [1] are inference, not training. You need to get a Nightshaded image into the training set of an image generator in order for this to have any effect. When you give an image to GPT-4V, Stable Diffusion img2img, or anything else, you're not training the AI - the model is completely frozen and does not change at all[0].

I don't know if anyone else is still scraping new images into the generators. I've heard somewhere that OpenAI stopped scraping around 2021 because they're worried about training on the output of their own models[1]. Adobe Firefly claims to have been trained on Adobe Stock images, but we don't know if Adobe has any particular cutoffs of their own[2].

If you want an image that screws up inference - i.e. one that GPT-4V or Stable Diffusion will choke on - you want an adversarial image. I don't know if you can adversarially train on a model you don't have weights for, though I've heard you can generalize adversarial training against multiple independent models to really screw shit up[3].

[0] All learning capability of text generators come from the fact that they have a context window; but that only provides a short term memory of 2048 tokens. They have no other memory capability.

[1] The scenario of what happens when you do this is fancifully called Habsburg AI. The model learns from it's own biases, reinforcing them into stronger biases, while forgetting everything else.

[2] It'd be particularly ironic if the only thing Nightshade harms is the one AI generator that tried to be even slightly ethical.

[3] At the extremes, these adversarial images fool humans. Though, the study that did this intentionally only showed the images for a small period of time, the idea being that short exposures are akin to a feed-forward neural network with no recurrent computation pathways. If you look at them longer, it's obvious that it's a picture of one thing edited to look like another.

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

#380

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…

I see it as no different than mapmakers inventing a nonexistent alley, to check who copies their maps verbatim ("trap street"). Even if this caused, for example, a car crash because of an autonomous driver, the onus I think would be on the one that made the car and used the stolen map for navigation, and not on the one that created the original map.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street

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