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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

#641

Post by xpe »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #628
xpe wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I most certainly do mean to call out copyright as willful, but it's not a deception, at least not a successful one: everyone knows it is false. Unless I'm misunderstanding you, this is not even wrong. What about copyright law is empirically false? Such a question is non-sensical. Your comment redefines the word "false" in a way that muddles understanding. You aren't alone -- some philosophers do this -- but it tend…

The very concept that a thing cannot be copied. That is the obvious falsehood that we are compelled to pretend is true. I don't see how any of that is muddled. I'm being as direct as I can with my words here. I'm talking about the very plain fact that art can be copied freely. For example, DRM software gives you encrypted content and the decryption key. Why bother? Because the end user is expected to pretend they are…

> The very concept that a thing cannot be copied. That is the obvious falsehood that we are compelled to pretend is true.

No, copyright law does _not_ compel us to believe that things cannot be copied. Instead, it establishes consequence of illegal copying. I'm flabbergasted that you, so far, don't recognize a simple and foundational difference between "can" and "should".

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

#642

Post by johnnyanmac »

mlrtime wrote: post #585
johnnyanmac wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should probably tell the other millions of artists busting out 60+ hour workweek in industry for half that price where these jobs are. That could solve this problem overnight.

And how are they different than the millions of factory workers on a line?

In a cosmic sense, no. Most of us are slaving away at some job when we would rather be doing something else but are bound by the need to fund lodging.

But in a more practical sense yes. There's not much personal nor logistical progression to make pushing pencils. Meanwhile, art is a craft that you can dedicate your life to improving and educating others on. It can be a career instead of merely a job to do.

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

#643

Post by matheusmoreira »

CatWChainsaw wrote: post #640
matheusmoreira wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Capitalism is not defined by the relative wealth of individuals. It's defined by ownership. Capitalists own property. Factories, buildings, companies, land, goods, stock, assets, copyrights, patents... All privately owned. If you're an owner, you're a capitalist. It's that simple. You're part of the ownership class. The common serfs? They don't own, they rent.

Claiming you're not a calitalist owner just because you're a poor starving artist, when the government quite literally grants you functionally infinite monopolies over everything you create whether you want it or not, is quite the take indeed. Not my fault artists are prone to selling off the rights to that monopoly to corporations for short term profit. It's like they don't even realize the power they have and the real capitalists are only too happy to relieve them of it.

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

#644

Post by warkdarrior »

schmichael wrote: post #123
KingOfCoders wrote: post #4

[flagged]

This is not one artist inspiring another. This is all artists providing their work for free to immensely capitalized corporations for the corporations sole profit. People keep making metaphors as if the AI is an entity in this transaction: it’s not! The AI is only the mechanism by which corporations launder IP.

Would it change your view if only open-source models were allowed to use the art in their training sets? What if a "capitalized corporation" starts using the open-source model?

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

#645

Post by withinboredom »

boolemancer wrote: post #634
withinboredom wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

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

If that were true, nobody would be afraid of the GPL's. When you buy a painting, you get an implicit license to do pretty much what you want and resell it, but you still can't put it in your YouTube videos (yeah, nobody cares, but "technically..."), create your own gallery, or put it on a stage ... but we're not talking about paintings. Not directly, anyway.

We are talking about implicit licenses, though; people's work is listed online with some implicit license. At the crux of this AI issue is whether or not there is an implied license when AI scans stuff and, if not, whether it is covered under fair use.

For example, my blog posts and short stories. I don't care if someone uses it for training, but if it is over-fitting and spitting out my stories as if it were its own ... I'd be pretty furious.

I'm interested to see what happens, but I have a sinking suspicion that for some AI companies, it won't be an issue (non-profit, actually research motivated, etc.) and probably will win a "fair use" argument. Then others create AI from people's code they host, doing it purely for profit; I highly doubt they would be able to defend themselves.

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

#646

Post by Ukv »

devmor wrote: post #635
Ukv wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 u…

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

I'd argue that essentially all work based off the work of others. I can only draw a "car" better than a random guess because I've seen many (individually copyrighted) car designs.

That's not to say we inherently have to treat use of statistical models the same, but rather that there does have to be a line somewhere to define where a new work, while dependant on previous works in aggregate, is sufficiently transformative - not carrying substantial similarity to any particular existing work that played a part in its creation - and can therefore be used by the author to make a living.

That line has to be placed in a way that prioritizes the progress of sciences and useful arts, rather than just enriching rightsholder megacorps like Getty Images/Universal Music. It should certainly allow training something like a tumor segmentation network, rather than rendering it infeasible.

Also, while whether it's morally okay is relevant and worth discussing, I think the question still stands of whether you believe my example would count as fair use, given the transformative nature and lack of impact on the market of the original work.

> 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.

I personally agree that they have a right to do so, but I don't think it'd be "baffling" that the [starving man/person training a tumor detector] would be against it, and it's likely not a "non-issue" for them to obtain sufficient [food/data] through other means.

Particularly since there are already means to opt-out that are respected by scrapers, and this is instead an attempt to do active damage. I guess in the analogy it'd be leaving out poisoned bread, although that's more extreme than I intend.

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

#647

Post by gfodor »

honkycat wrote: post #624
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…

"A law, ie, leveraging state backed violence to deter the things they don’t want." We all know what a law is you don't need to clarify. It makes your prose less readable.

Other people pointed out they appreciated this prose. It’s easy to forget what exactly people are asking for when they talk about regulating the training of machine learning models.

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

#648

Post by kjs3 »

542458 wrote: 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…

Seems obvious that the people stealing would be adjusting their process to negate these kinds of countermeasures all the time. I don't see this as an arms race the artists are going to win. Not like the LLM folks can consider actually paying their way...the business plan pretty much has "...by stealing everything we can get our hands on..." in the executive summary.

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

#649

Post by elzbardico »

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…

You don’t need it to visible. You only need it to be scrapped to poison the models. I think that’s the idea.

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

#650

Post by CaptainFever »

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…

Right. IP is about balancing the harms done to the public versus the incentives given to the creators. That's why discussions about "creators want this and that" produce unbalanced objectives because... what about the public? IP is meant to benefit the public domain, it is not meant to protect creator interests.

I'm glad free software came about, where software owners realised that the power they had over their users were unjust. Hopefully the same can happen to other creative fields.

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