Glaze and Nightshade: How artists are taking arms against AI scraping

By Ryan J Leck, Arts Law volunteer

Artists the world over have begun using digital tools such as Glaze and Nightshade to fight back against generative artificial intelligence (AI) training models and people using their works without permission to perform AI scraping. 

Mass unauthorised data usage and artistic exploitation by AI companies such as OpenAI, Google and Meta is an epidemic, one that has led to the creation of several tools that artists are using to wage war on data-hungry AI models. Artists may find their brands and reputation harmed by the spread of copies of their style and presentation scattered throughout the internet without credit or compensation. 

What is AI scraping?

AI scraping is the process by which data, whether in the form of text or images, is captured from examples online for use in training generative AI. Many of these images, including artistic works, may be copyright content (that is, legally under the protection of copyright). This has led to numerous copyright infringement cases against AI companies, especially in the US. 

However, for artists who may not have the financial means to pursue a lawsuit when their works have been infringed, a more efficient method of protecting their works is desperately needed. 

What is Glaze?

Glaze functions to preserve and protect an artist’s style from being replicated by generative AI. It is the tool of choice for Australian digital artist Stephen Cornwell, who has managed to preserve his surrealist style using Glaze.

Designed by University of Chicago researcher Shawn Shan and his team, Glaze is a free downloadable digital tool that combats artistic style mimicry. Glaze works by understanding the AI models that are trained on scraped data and embellishing the artistic work with changes that are imperceptible to the human eye but are dramatically different to AI models. 

A user who prompts the AI system to generate art mimicking an artist protected by Glaze will find the result quite different to what they expected,. The theory is that this will dissuade them from replicating the artist’s style. 

While there are some issues to be ironed out with the tool, Glaze is continually updated and features a web version for use on mobile-friendly devices. 

What is Nightshade?

Whereas Glaze functioned primarily as a shield for artists against data scraping and style mimicry, Nightshade was also conceived by the team behind Glaze as an offensive tool used to “poison” sample images that generative AI models use for training.

Whilst functionally similar to Glaze in that it relies on altered AI perceptions of an image, Nightshade works to continually poison the data relied on by the AI model. Nightshade alters the AI’s perception of objects in the image, where, instead of altering the stylistic expression of the object in the image, it renders an entirely different object. For example, where a human may see a shaded image of a cup, the AI model might see a shaded image of a cat. It will then continuously misidentify a cup for a cat when a sufficient number of shaded images of a cup are fed to the model. 

This, however, requires more of a collaborative effort from a group of artists to sufficiently dilute the data. Nightshade’s lead developer Ben Zhao advises using Nightshade and Glaze in tandem, as Nightshade does not provide mimicry protection like Glaze. The team is currently working on incorporating Nightshade into WebGlaze to streamline their services.

Looking forward

As with any security measure, both Glaze’s and Nightshade’s effectiveness may diminish over time as AI models evolve. Additionally, whilst changes made by these tools to the artworks are minimal, variations are still made to the visual quality of the artist’s original image. We must be mindful that these are not one-stop-shop solutions. 

Nonetheless, these tools potentially represent a drastic power shift in favour of artists in their fight against AI infringement. 

Together with stronger legislative protections against AI infringement that are hopefully implemented soon, we are confident that Glaze and Nightshade will serve as vital instruments to empower artists and preserve their creative rights.

Here at Arts Law we are dedicated to protecting artists from copyright infringement and informing artists about their rights. Arts Law has Information Sheets on a heap of relevant topics, including the Australian Consumer Law, copyright and trade marks. We are also actively participating in the A-G’s Roundtable on Copyright and the steering group, discussing the implications of and issues surrounding AI and copyright (CAIRG) . If you are an artist and need legal assistance in relation to AI or anything else, you can lodge a query with Arts Law here.