Being a graphic artist since 2022 has been a total nightmare, as the emergence of AI images meant total hell. The disrespect of having your work used to train AI imagers not only without your permission but also receiving financial benefits, completely ignoring the fact that it doesn't belong to them, is infuriating.
The number of lawsuits that large companies face is countless, but still, many smaller companies slip under the radar no matter how many laws that support the intellectual property of artists, continue to use your work to generate new images with your content without your consent.
With this problem still very present in the world, and not going to go away so easily, there are also people using AI itself to address the problems of AI. Thanks to this is that Nightshade was born, a tool that allows you to poison the graphic data of the images, thus giving a chance for your work not to be used by AI image generators, and if they are used, well, they run the risk of being poisoned.
“We’re showing the fact that generative models in general, no pun intended, are just models. Nightshade itself is not meant as an end-all, extremely powerful weapon to kill these companies, Nightshade shows that these models are vulnerable and there are ways to attack. What it means is that there are ways for content owners to provide harder returns than writing Congress or complaining via email or social media.” Zhao.
What Nightshade does is simple, it alters the image data at the pixel level, giving the human eye one view, while the AI imagers interpret the images as something completely different. In this way AI image generators are fooled, mis-categorizing the images they use for text prompts, thus generating erroneous images that do not match what they were asked to do.
This not only allows artists to protect their art but also allows them to attack companies that use their art without their permission, monetizing something they shouldn't, remorselessly stealing someone else's work and effort for their profit that does not remunerate the original artist in any way.
Nightshade is free to download, so any artist can have the program on their computer, process their original work through Nightshade, which would grant an undetectable layer of protection to the human eye for every AI imager to be corrupted from within by using someone else's work without their permission.
Nightshade represents a lot for artists, as it is not only a tool to protect their work, but also attacks those who take advantage of the honest work of others.