New tools help artists protect original work from AI

The creators of two new copyright protection tools are helping artists fight back against generative artificial intelligence.

If you’ve spent any time playing with modern artificial intelligence (AI) image generators, it can seem like an almost magical experience; but the truth is these programs are more like a magic trick than magic.

Without the human-generated art of hundreds of thousands of people, these programs wouldn’t work. But those artists are not getting compensated, in fact many of them are being put out of business by the very programs their work helped create.

Now, two computer scientists from the University of Chicago, Ben Zhao and Heather Zheng, are fighting back.

They’ve developed two programs, called Glaze and Nightshade, which create a type of “poison pill” to help protect against generative AI tools like Midjourney and DALL-E, helping artists protect their copyrighted, original work. Their work may also revolutionize all of our relationships to these systems.

In this episode of the Big Brains podcast, the scientists explain their work and the issues with AI image generators:

Read this episode’s transcript. Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Source: University of Chicago