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For many artists, it’s a shaky time to put art online. AI image generators have evolved to cheaply replicate a wide range of unique styles, and essentially all the popular platforms are They are rushing to update their terms of use Get the power to collect as much data as possible for AI training.
Defenses against AI training exist — Glaze, for example, is a tool that adds a tiny amount of noise to images that’s imperceptible to humans to prevent image generators from copying an artist’s style — but they’re not a permanent solution as tech companies persist in their quest for profits by building increasingly sophisticated AI models that increasingly threaten to dilute artists’ brands and replace them in the marketplace.
In one high-profile example, last month the estate of Ansel Adams accused Adobe of selling AI-generated images that stole the famous photographer’s style. reportAdobe responded quickly, removing the AI copycats. But it’s not just famous artists who are at risk of plagiarism. Lesser-known artists may have a harder time proving that an AI model references their work. In this near-lawless world, every uploaded image risks an artist’s downfall, and every new piece they promote online can dilute the demand for their own work.
Not surprisingly, artists are increasingly seeking protections to mitigate or avoid these AI risks. As tech companies update the terms of their products (such as Meta’s sudden announcement last December that it was training its AI on 1 billion photos from Facebook and Instagram users), artists are frantically scanning the landscape for new defenses. As a result, The Glaze Project, which currently has a limited number of AI protections available, has recently reported a dramatic increase in requests for free tools.
The Glaze Project’s tools, which aim to prevent stylistic copying and even contaminate AI models to thwart data scraping without the artist’s consent or compensation, are now in more demand than ever. Ben Chao, the University of Chicago professor who created the tools, told Ars that the backlog for approving a “surge” in access requests is “horrible.” And, as he recently put it: Posts According to X (formerly Twitter), the “explosive increase in demand” that began in June is likely to continue as long as AI threats continue to evolve, meaning that for the time being, artists looking for protection against AI will have to wait.
Even if Zhao’s team were to just approve requests for WebGlaze, an invite-only, web-based version of Glaze, “it probably still won’t be available,” Zhao said, and he warned X artists to prepare for delays.
Further complicating artists’ woes is that at the same time that demand for Glaze has skyrocketed, the tool has come under attack from security researchers, who claim that Glaze’s protections can not only be circumvented, but easily circumvented. For security researchers and some artists, the attacks raise questions about whether Glaze can truly protect artists in these trying times. But for the thousands of artists who join Glaze’s queue, the long-term future is so bleak that the promise of protection against copycats seems worth the wait.
Glaze-splitting attack sparks debate
Millions of people have already downloaded Glaze, and many artists have been waiting weeks or even months for access to WebGlaze, most of them sending invitation requests on social media. The process can take a while, as the Glaze project vets every request to ensure each user is human and to prevent bad actors from abusing the tool.
The team currently struggles to approve the hundreds of requests that come in every day via direct messages on Instagram and Twitter in the order they are received, and artists who request access endure long delays. Because the inboxes on these platforms aren’t designed to easily sort through messages, artists who follow up on requests end up at the back of the queue; their messages bounce back to the top of the inbox, and Zhao’s team, which is mostly volunteers, continues to approve requests from the bottom up.
“This is clearly a problem,” Zhao wrote to X, urging them to not send follow-ups to artists who had not received an invitation. “We may need to change how we do invitations and rethink the future of WebGlaze to make it sustainable enough to support a large and growing user base.”
Interest in Glaze also appears to be growing by word of mouth: Reid Southen, a freelance concept artist on major motion pictures, recommends that all artists use Glaze. Reid told Ars that WebGlaze is especially “great” because it’s “free and available to anyone who doesn’t have the GPU power to run the program on their home machine.”