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Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu

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

#631

Post by boolemancer »

withinboredom wrote: post #574
Thiez wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every waking second humans are training on what they see in their surroundings, including any copyrighted works in sight. Want to compare untrained AI fairly? Compare their artistic abilities with a newborn.

No. That is NOT what humans do unless you somehow learn grammar without going to school. Most of a human's childhood is spent learning from their parents so that they can move about and communicate at least a little effectively. Then, they go to school and learn rules, social, grammar, math, and so forth. There's some learning via copyrighted works (such as textbooks, entertainment, etc.), but literally, none of this…

> Generative AI, however, can ONLY learn via the theft of copyrighted works.

That's not true at all. Any works in the public domain are not copyrighted, and there are things that are not copyrightable, like lists of facts and recipes.

Generative AI could be trained exclusively on such works (though obviously it would be missing a lot of context, so probably wouldn't be as desirable as something trained on everything).

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

#632

Post by MrNeon »

CatWChainsaw wrote: post #617
MrNeon wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is how consent works.

If my body is in a public space you have the right to force me to have sex with you, I guess? That's your logic after all.

Data you put up on the internet is not your body.

Do I really have to explain this? You know I don't. Do better.

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

#633

Post by Ukv »

enord wrote: post #629
Ukv wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It brings potential audience their way, so most don’t make use of their _right_ to be de-listed. The Authors Guild lawsuit against Google Books ended in a 2015 ruling that Google Books is fair use and as such they don't have a right to be de-listed. It's not the case that they have a right to be de-listed but choose not to make use of it. The same would apply if collation of data for machine learning datasets is fo…

With the caveat that I was exactly wrong about the books de-listing, I feel you are making my point for me and retreating to a more pragmatic position about defaults. The (quite entertaining) saga of Nightshade tells a story about what is going to be content creators “default position” going forward and everyone else will follow. You would be a fool not to, the AI companies are trying to end run you, using your own c…

> I feel you are making my point for me and retreating to a more pragmatic position about defaults

I'm unclear on what stance I've supposedly retreated from. My position is that an opt-out is not necessary under current US law, but that it wouldn't be the worst-case outcome if new regulation were introduced to mandate it.

> The (quite entertaining) saga of Nightshade tells a story about what is going to be content creators “default position” going forward and everyone else will follow

By "default" I refer not to the most common choice, but to the outcome that results from inaction. There's a bias towards this default even if the majority of rightsholders do opt to use Nightshade (which I think is unlikely).

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

#634

Post by boolemancer »

withinboredom wrote: post #576
boolemancer wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright is there to allow you to stop other people from copying your work, but it doesn't give you control over anything else that they might do with it. If I buy your painting, you can stop me from making copies and selling them to other people, but you can't stop me from selling my original copy to whomever I want, nor could you stop me from painting little dinosaurs all over it and hanging it in my hallway. That…

There's an implied license when you buy a work of art. However, there can also be explicit licenses (think Banksy) to allow the distribution of their work. These explicit license can be just about anything (MIT, GPL, AGPL, etc)

Any explicit license would only apply to copyrights, including all of the ones you listed there. Buying a painting is not copying it, neither is looking at it, so it wouldn't matter if I had a license for it or not.

The fact is that copyright only applies to specific situations, it does not give you complete control over the thing you made and what can be done with it.

If I buy your book, I can lend it to a friend and they can read it without paying you. I can read it out loud to my children. I can cross out your words and write in my own, even if it completely changes the meaning of the story. I can highlight passages and write in the margins. I can tear pages out and use them for kindling. I can go through and tally up how many times you use each word.

Copyright only gives you control over copies, end even then there are limits on that control.

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

#635

Post by devmor »

Ukv wrote: post #421
devmor wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe it's a "doesn't deserve to exist" situation, because these things genuinely can be used for the public good. However - and this is a big however - I don't believe it deserves the legal protection to be used for profit. I am of the opinion that if you train your model on data that you do not hold the rights for, your usage should be handled similarly to most fair use laws. It's fine to use it for your…

> It's fine to use it for your personal projects, for research and education, etc. but it is not OK to use it for commercial endeavors. Say I train a machine vision model that, after having pretrained on ImageNet or similar, detects deformities in a material for a small company that manufactures that material. Do you not think that would be fair use, despite being commercial? To me it seems highly transformative (a d…

No, I don't generally think it's okay to profit off of the work of others without their consent.

>Moreover, you said it was "Baffling to see anyone argue against this technology" but it seems there are at least some models (like if my above detector was non-commercial) that you're ethically okay with and could be affected by this poisoning.

Just because I think there are situations where it's not ethically wrong to use someone's work without permission does not mean I think it's ethically wrong for someone to protect their work any way they see fit.

To use an extreme example: I do not think it's wrong for a starving man to steal food. I also do not think it's wrong for someone to defend their food from being stolen, regardless of the morality of the thieves' motivation.

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

#636

Post by CatWChainsaw »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #4

[flagged]

Sigh. Once again: I always love it when techbros say that AI learning and human learning are exactly the same, because reading one thing at a time at a biological pace and remembering takeaway ideas rather than verbatim passages is obviously exactly the same thing as processing millions of inputs at once and still being able to regurgitate sources so perfectly that verbatim copyrighted content can be spit out of an LLM that doesn't 'contain' its training material.

I'm just glad that so many more people have caught on to the bullshit than this time last year, or even six months ago.

I really don't even get the endgame. Art gets "democratized", so anyone who doesn't want their style copied stops putting stuff on the internet, and eventually all human art is trained, so the only new contributions are genAI. Maybe we could get a few centuries worth of stuff of "robot unicorn in the style of Artist X with a flair of Y" permutations, but even ignoring the centipede, that just sounds... boring. worthless.

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

#637

Post by MichaelZuo »

deadbeeves wrote: post #429
MichaelZuo wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Continuing to ignore this point won't make the prior comments seem any more persuasive, in fact probably less. So here's another chance to engage productively instead of just declaring things to be true or false, 'objective', etc., with only the…

I believe I've already addressed it. You say: The fact that production in style S (of artist A) can exceed human consumption capability makes the fact that someone's style can be reproduced without bounds irrelevant. You mention as an example all the AI-generated garbage text that no human will ever read. I say: Whether it's irrelevant is subjective, but that production in style S is arbitrarily higher with an AI tha…

Sure we can agree to disagree then.

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

#638

Post by Detrytus »

trimethylpurine wrote: post #526
fenomas wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At full size it's super obvious - I made a side-by-side: https://i.imgur.com/I6EQ05g.png

I still don't see a difference. (Mobile)

Second picture looks like you were looking at it through a dirty window, there's lot of pale white stains, or light reflections, it's really blurry.

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

#639

Post by NoahKAndrews »

golol wrote: post #587
Reubend wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Huge market for snake oil here. This tool is free, and as far as I can tell it runs locally. If you're not selling anything, and there's no profit motive, then I don't think you can reasonably call it "snake oil". At worst, it's a waste of time. But nobody's being deceived into purchasing it.

Religion is also deceptive and snake-oil even if it does not involve profit driven motivations.

It very often does involve such motivations, though I agree with your larger point.

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

#640

Post by CatWChainsaw »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #313
CaptainFever wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. This new outrage is just the copyright owners realising that their power is not safe. Where is the outrage when self checkouts happened?

Copyright owners indeed. That's what these artists are. They're copyright owners. Monopolists. They are the capital. Capitalism is all about owning property. Copyright is intellectual property. Literally imaginary property. Ownership of information, of bits, of numbers . These artists are the literal epitome of capitalism. They enjoy state granted monopolies that last multiple human lifetimes. We'll be long dead befo…

Claiming that a single artist of modest means whose work was used for model training explicitly against their wishes.... is exactly the same as the multibillion corporation doing the training and profiting off it at fleet-of-megayachts scale.... certainly is a take, I'll give you that. If you ever quote "first they came" in a self-pitying context, remember that you deserve it.
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