It’s far from invisible in most cases, we’ll have to wait for their code release to know how visible it is. It effectively embeds the shape of another image into an existing image in an attempt to confuse the model. There have been quite a few attempts at this including one from the authors of the same paper. The typical trade off is image quality for protection/removal difficulty.
Comment on This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI
hypnicjerk@lemmy.world 8 months ago
this seems interesting, but how does it actually work? “invisible changes to the pixels” is vague and the article does not go into more detail of the actual method of manipulation or the ways that an invisible input can affect visible changes in the output.
BetaDoggo_@lemmy.world 8 months ago
atx_aquarian@lemmy.world 8 months ago
From my understanding of the article, it’s more about associating misleading terms with images to confuse the associations learned by the model. I didn’t see anything in the article about some sneaky way of tainting images themselves unless it means a server is serving bogus images when a client fails the “are you a robot” test.
Curious to learn if anyone knows more about what it’s actually doing.
hypnicjerk@lemmy.world 8 months ago
yes to me it read like it was manipulating metadata somehow, not the images themselves, but the article directly contradicts that. and that would be useless as soon as someone saves it as a flat image file or screenshots and cuts it out. i’m assuming for this tool to work it needs to be changing the image directly through some sort of watermark-like system.
nicetriangle@kbin.social 8 months ago
If it works anything like the other supposed AI image protector tool I'm aware of (Glaze) then it's not gonna look great and I would not call it a practical way to go. Everything I've seen run through glaze looks objectively worse than the original.
Also in the long run this is just an arms race and it's just a matter of time before models learn to subvert these kinds of tools. And if that's the case that means every time someone figures out how to get over these hurdles, anyone looking to protect their images will have to go back and replace every online instance of those images when the protection tool comes out with a fix. Back and forth forever.
And that's just ridiculous and basically impossible when you realize that stuff gets reposted all over the net all the time and can't be controlled.
FaceDeer@kbin.social 8 months ago
And if those older versions got downloaded and saved by a trainer there's nothing at all they can do to replace those.
This all feels a lot like the DRM treadmill, which has never done much to actually prevent piracy.
nicetriangle@kbin.social 8 months ago
Yep totally agree. It's a pointless effort to try to combat the issue of AI this way.
hypnicjerk@lemmy.world 8 months ago
from the article, so it’s likely they run on similar principles.