Since nobody answered all the questions I had I read up a bit on #GlazeProject and #Nightshade. So here’s a summary of what I would have liked people to explain / mention rather than just saying “use glaze to protect your art from AI’.
Both are developed by a group from the University of Chicago. They have published a paper about Glaze where they explain at depth how it was developed, and how they worked with artists to verify its efficiency:
https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/media.html
There is also a paper about Nightshade: https://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~ravenben/publications/abstracts/nightshade-oakland24.html
The two tools have different purposes. Glaze should protect your art against style mimicry. If you use it, your image will contain fragments of a different style that are barely noticeable for a human eye but an AI will pick them up. So when someone prompts an AI to draw something in your style, it will actually not look like your style to humans.
Nightshade is about making AI deliberately get different information about what your image looks like vs what the metadata says is visible. So you might draw a cat but the AI “sees” a cup instead, and if it gets a lot of data like that it will draw cups whenever people ask it to generate a drawing of a cat.
So I’m assuming that this one will only be effective if a lot of artists use Nightshade to deceive the AIs.
Both programs are available to run locally, so you’re not running your images through someone’s server.
They have added a browser version of Glaze because they learned that some artists don’t work heavily with desktop PCs (yes, that’s me - I draw and upload everything from my tablet). But you don’t have to use it.
There is a lot of easily understandable information about all this on their website.
https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/aboutus.html
In general, these tools seem legit and effective. FAQ on the page suggests that AI companies are trying to reverse or offset the “cloaking” done by glaze, which also indicates that it’s working.
Personally, I’m not sure if I’m well-known enough that anyone would prompt an AI image generator to “draw XY in Jitsch’s style” (but you never know). I would like to use Nightshade for overall destroying AI datasets, but I can’t on my tablet so far.
Also adding that as a comic artist, an AI might learn to “draw” like me, but the core of it are my stories, characters and designs. I think we have yet to see that AI can come up with a consistent story with believable characters.
My personal conclusion is that for now, I will not change, but if they integrate Nightshade into WebGlaze or make something like a WebNightshade, I will try it.
Jitsch