A dispute over the use of intellectual property of an artwork used to train a generative artificial intelligence (AI) model has led to the developer being sued by the artist. Until the issue is resolved in court, the artwork will continue to be used to train newer AI models. Artists are now finally given a weapon to prevent their work from being used without permission through the Nightshade software.
This software changes the image at the pixel level. The human eye cannot see the changes made but the AI software will be poisoned by it seeing something that is not in the image. For example, a picture of a cat is poisoned at the pixel level to be seen as a crocodile when seen by AI. As a result the AI was trained with incorrect data. When the AI is asked to generate an image of a cat, it will generate an image with a crocodile because its training database has been poisoned by Nightshade.
Nightshade was developed by a group of computer scientists from the University of Chicago under the name The Glaze Project. It can be downloaded for free for Windows and Mac computers. Artists who do not want their work to be used without permission by AI can download Nightshade 1.0 via the link below.