Nightshade, the free tool that ‘poisons’ AI models, is now available for artists to use
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https://venturebeat.com/ai/nightshade-the-free-tool-that-poisons-ai-models-is-now-available-for-artists-to-use/
Reminder that this is made by Ben Zhao, the University of Chicago professor who stole open source code for his last data poisoning scheme.
You don’t follow the license that it was distributed under.
Commonly, if you use open source code in your project and that code is under a license that requires your project to be open source if you do that, but then you keep yours closed source.
I still wouldn't call it stealing, but I guess "broke open source code licenses" doesn't have the same impact, but I'd prefer accuracy.
It’s piracy, distributing copyrighted works against the terms of its license. I agree stealing is not really the right word.
I think it makes the most sense to think of it like stealing the way plagiarism is stealing.
He took GPLv3 code, which is a copyleft license that requires you share your source code and license your project under the same terms as the code you used. You also can't distribute your project as a binary-only or proprietary software. When pressed, they only released the code for their front end, remaining in violation of GPLv3.
Probably the reason they're moving to a Web offering. They could just take down the binary files and be gpl compliant, this whole thing is so stupid
Yes, I meant more that AGPL was created to plug this particular loophole. As in, if it was AGPL, they couldn't do this.
That's true
Although I personally am not a fan of licences this strict, MIT+Apache2.0 seems good enough for me. Of course, that might change with time and precedents like this 😅
And as I said there, it is utterly hypocritical for him to sell snake oil to artists, allegedly to help them fight copyright violations, while committing actual copyright violations.
Is there a similar tool that will "poison" my personal tracked data? Like, I know I'm going to be tracked and have a profile built on me by nearly everywhere online. Is there a tool that I can use to muddy that profile so it doesn't know if I'm a trans Brazilian pet store owner, a Nigerian bowling alley systems engineer, or a Beverly Hills sanitation worker who moonlights as a practice subject for budding proctologists?
The only way to taint your behavioral data so that you don’t get lumped into a targetable cohort is to behave like a manic. As I’ve said in a past comment here, when you fill out forms, pretend your gender, race, and age is fluid. Also, pretend you’re nomadic. Then behave erratic as fuck when shopping online - pay for bibles, butt plugs, taxidermy, and PETA donations.
Your data will be absolute trash. You’ll also be miserable because you’re going to be visiting the Amazon drop off center with gag balls and porcelain Jesus figurines to return every week.
Then behave erratic as fuck when shopping online - pay for bibles, butt plugs, taxidermy, and PETA donations.
...in the same transaction. It all needs to be bought and then shipped together. Not only to fuck with the algorithm, but also to fuck with the delivery guy. Because we usually know what you ordered. Especially when it's in the soft bag packaging. Might as well make everyone outside your personal circle think you're a bit psychologically disturbed, just to be safe.
Other than buying the erratic shit, that's pretty much who I am. I've never been honest on a form and I'm a bit of a nomad.
I know that back in the day when Facebook guessed your political affiliation and other things they got everything about me hilariously wrong. I'm not a Republican with 3 kids and a hummer. Google seems to get closer with the targeted ads, but honestly not that much closer.
I can be individually identified, but my identity is garbage and not useful.
The browser addon "AdNauseum" can help with that, although it's not a complete solution.
That looks useful for these wanting to track MS rewards points...
...if you can get them, that is
Is there a similar tool that will “poison” my personal tracked data? Like, I know I’m going to be tracked and have a profile built on me by nearly everywhere online. Is there a tool that I can use to muddy that profile so it doesn’t know if I’m a trans Brazilian pet store owner, a Nigerian bowling alley systems engineer, or a Beverly Hills sanitation worker who moonlights as a practice subject for budding proctologists?
Have you considered just being utterly incoherent, and not making sense as a person? That could work.
Mbyae try siunlhffg the mldide lterets of ervey wrod? I wnedor waht taht deos to a luaangge medol?
•
I guess it depends what your threat model is.
If you don't like advertising, then you're just piling a bunch of extra interests/demographics in there. It'll remain roughly as valuable as it was before.
If you're concerned about privacy and state actors, your activity would just increase. Anything that would trigger state interest would remain, so you'd presumably receive the same level of interest. Worse, if you aren't currently of interest, there's a possibility randomly generated traffic would be flagged by your adversary and increase their level of interest in you.
or a Beverly Hills sanitation worker who moonlights as a practice subject for budding proctologists?
Yeah, it's definitely the last one 😆
There are programs and plugins you can download that will open a bunch of random websites to throw off tracking programs.
Idk if this is what you're looking for but might be worth taking a look
https://github.com/eth0izzle/Needl
"Your ISP is most likely tracking your browsing habits and selling them to marketing agencies (albeit anonymised). Or worse, making your browsing history available to law enforcement at the hint of a Subpoena. Needl will generate random Internet traffic in an attempt to conceal your legitimate traffic, essentially making your data the Needle in the haystack and thus harder to find. The goal is to make it harder for your ISP, government, etc to track your browsing history and habits."
Might be interesting to set up a club where people swap supermarket loyalty cards on the regular...
The tool's creators are seeking to make it so that AI model developers must pay artists to train on data from them that is uncorrupted.
That's not something a technical solution will work for. We need copyright laws to be updated.
You should check out this article by Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the EFF. The EFF is a digital rights group who recently won a historic case: border guards now need a warrant to search your phone.
A few quotes:
and
Yeah, that's what I'm saying - our current copiright laws are insufficient to deal with AI art generation.
They aren't insufficient, they are working just fine. In the US, fair use balances the interests of copyright holders with the public’s right to access and use information. There are rights people can maintain over their work, and the rights they do not maintain have always been to the benefit of self-expression and discussion. We shouldn't be trying to make that any worse.
Yep. Copyright should not include "viewing or analyzing the picture" rights. Artists want to start charging you or software to even look at their art they literally put out for free. If u don't want your art seen by a person or an AI then don't publish it.
Copyright should absolutely include analyzing when you're talking about AI, and for one simple reason: companies are profiting off of the work of artists without compensating them. People want the rewards of work without having to do the work. AI has the potential to be incredibly useful for artists and non artists alike, but these kinds of people are ruining it for everybody.
What artists are asking for is ethical sourcing for AI datasets. We're talking paying a licensing fee or using free art that's opt-in. Right now, artists have no choice in the matter - their rights to their works are being violated by corporations. Already the music industry has made it illegal to use songs in AI without the artist's permission. You can't just take songs and make your own synthesizer out of them, then sell it. If you want music for something you're making, you either pay a licensing fee of some kind (like paying for a service) or use free-use songs. That's what artists want.
When an artist, who does art for a living, posts something online, it's an ad for their skills. People want to use AI to take the artist out of the equation. And doing so will result in creativity only being possible for people wealthy enough to pay for it. Much of the art you see online, and almost all the art you see in a museum, was paid for by somebody. Van Gogh died a poor man because people didn't want to buy his art. The Sistine Chapel was commissioned by a Pope. You take the artist out of the equation and what's left? Just AI art made as a derivative of AI art that was made as a derivative of other art.
You should check out this article by Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the EFF. The EFF is a digital rights group who recently won a historic case: border guards now need a warrant to search your phone.
MidJourney is already storing pre-rendered images made from and mimicking around 4,000 artists' work. The derivative works infringement is already happening right out in the open.
It's sad some people feel that way. That kind of monopoly on expression and ideas would only serve to increase disparities and divisions, manipulate discourse in subtle ways, and in the end, fundamentally alter how we interact with each other for the worse.
What they want would score a huge inadvertent home run for corporations and swing the doors open for them hindering competition, stifling undesirable speech, and monopolizing spaces like nothing we’ve seen before. There are very good reasons we have the rights we have, and there's nothing good that can be said about anyone trying to make them worse.
Also, rest assured they'd collude with each other and only use their new powers to stamp out the little guy. It'll be like American ISPs busting attempts at municipal internet all over again.
Seems like Disney is as eager to adopt this technology as anyone
A few goofy Steamboat Willie knock offs pale beside the benefit of axing half your art department every few years, until everything is functionally a procedural generation.
They're playing both sides. Who do you think wins when model training becomes prohibitively expensive to for regular people? Mega corporations already own datasets, and have the money to buy more. And that's before they make users sign predatory ToS allowing them exclusive access to user data, effectively selling our own data back to us.
Regular people, who could have had access to a competitive, corporate-independent tool for creativity, education, entertainment, and social mobility, would instead be left worse off and with less than where we started.
Who do you think wins when model training becomes prohibitively expensive to for regular people?
We passed that point at inception. Its always been more efficient for Microsoft to do its training at a 10,000 Petaflop giga-plant in Iowa than for me to run Stable Diffusion on my home computer.
Regular people, who could have had access to a competitive, corporate-independent tool for creativity, education, entertainment, and social mobility
Already have that. It's called a $5 art kit from Michael's.
This isn't about creation, its about trade and propagation of the finished product within the art market. And its here that things get fucked, because my beautiful watercolor that took me 20 hours to complete isn't going to find a buyer that covers half a week's worth of living expenses, so long as said market place is owned and operated by folks who want my labor for free.
AI generation serves to mine the market at near-zero cost and redistribute the finished works for a profit.
Copyright/IP serves to separate the creator of a work from its future generative profits.
But all this ultimately happens within the context of the market itself. The legal and financial mechanics of the system are designed to profit publishers and distributors at the expense of creatives. That's always been true and the latest permutation in how creatives get fucked is merely a variation on a theme.
instead be left worse off and with less than where we started.
AI Art does this whether or not its illegal, because it exists to undercut human creators of content by threatening them with an inferior-but-vastly-cheaper alternative.
The dynamic you're describing has nothing to do with AI's legality and everything to do with Disney's ability to operate as monopsony buyer of bulk artistic product. The only way around this is to break Disney up as a singular mass-buyer of artwork, and turn the component parts of the business over to the artists (and other employees of the firm) as an enterprise that answers to and profits the people generating the valuable media rather than some cartel of third-party shareholders.
We passed that point at inception. Its always been more efficient for Microsoft to do its training at a 10,000 Petaflop giga-plant in Iowa than for me to run Stable Diffusion on my home computer.
You don't need industrial level efficiency or insane overhead costs, that's why it's a big deal. It's something regular people can do at home.
Already have that. It’s called a $5 art kit from Michael’s.
An art set from Michaels can only do so much. Having access to the most cutting edge tools and techniques has always propelled artists and art forward. Imagine not having access to digital art tools, computer animation, digital photography, digital sculpting, and interactive media tools to expand artistic expression, and allow for the creation of new forms, styles, and genres of art that weren't possible before?
Copyright/IP serves to separate the creator of a work from its future generative profits.
But all this ultimately happens within the context of the market itself. The legal and financial mechanics of the system are designed to profit publishers and distributors at the expense of creatives. That’s always been true and the latest permutation in how creatives get fucked is merely a variation on a theme.
Fighting their fight for them won't help in the end, don't make it easier for them.
AI Art does this whether or not its illegal, because it exists to undercut human creators of content by threatening them with an inferior-but-vastly-cheaper alternative.
It isn't necessarily a competitor or a threat, the tools are open source and free for all artists to use to enhance their creative process, explore new possibilities, and imagine novel outcomes. You can use it to help you reach new audiences, and discover new forms of expression. It's not a zero-sum game like you suggest.
The dynamic you’re describing has nothing to do with AI’s legality and everything to do with Disney’s ability to operate as monopsony buyer of bulk artistic product. The only way around this is to break Disney up as a singular mass-buyer of artwork, and turn the component parts of the business over to the artists (and other employees of the firm) as an enterprise that answers to and profits the people generating the valuable media rather than some cartel of third-party shareholders.
That would still leave the baby-disneys with way more money than your average Joe, solving nothing. Training models isn't so expansive that they wouldn't enough have the money to train their own, that cost is only prohibitive to the working man.
The issue is simply reproduction of original works.
Plenty of people mimic the style of other artists. They do this by studying the style of the artist they intend to mimic. Why is it different when a machine does the same thing?
It's different because a machine can be replicated and can produce results at a rate that hundreds of humans can't match. If a human wants to replicate your art style, they have to invest a lot of time into learning art and practicing your style. A machine doesn't have to do these things.
This would be fine if we weren't living in a capitalist society, but since we do, this will only result in further transfer of assets towards the rich.
It's not. People are just afraid of being replaced, especially when they weren't that original or creative in the first place.
Honestly, it extends beyond creative works.
OpenAI should not be held back from subscribing to a research publication, or buying college textbooks, etc. As long as the original works are not reproduced and the underlying concepts are applied, there are no intellectual property issues. You can't even say the commercial application of the text is the issue, because I can go to school and use my knowledge to start a company.
I understand that in some select scenarios, ChatGPT has been tricked into outputting training data. Seems to me they should focus on fixing that, as it would avoid IP issues moving forward.
AI image creation tools are apparently both artistically empty, incapable of creating anything artistically interesting, and also a existential threat to visual artists. Hmm, wonder what this says about the artistic merits of the work of furry porn commission artist #7302.
Retail workers can be replaced with self checkout, translators can be replaced with machine translation, auto workers can be replaced with robotic arms, specialist machinists can be replaced with CNC mills. But illustrators must be where we draw the line.
That would make it harder for creative people to produce things and make money from it. Abolishing copyright isn't the answer. We still need a system like that.
A shorter period of copyright, would encourage more new content. As creative industries could no longer rely on old outdated work.
That would make it harder for creative people to produce things and make money from it
no, it would make it easier.
it would be harder to stop people from making money on creative works.
You write a book, people start buying that book. Someone copies that book and sells it for 10 pence on Amazon. You get nothing from each sale.
You write a song and people want to listen to it. Spotify serves them that song, you get nothing because you have no right to own your copy.
That's how free/libre and open-source software has worked since forever. And it works just fine. There is no need for an exclusive right to commercialise a product in order for it to be produced. You are basically parroting a decades old lie from Hollywood.
Yeah, you don't need exclusive rights for it to be produced. But artists, especially smaller artists, need that right to do silly things like paying for food and rent.
you can still sell your book
you can still sell your song.
but your song can be a remix. your book can be a retelling of a popular story.
you can still make money. you just can't stop other people from making money. that is all copyright does, and it is wrong. it destroys culture.
I don't think you understand how copyrights work. If they are abolished, everybody is free to redistribute your creation without compensation or even acknowledgement. The moment you put it out there, it's instantly public domain.
That means we'd have no more professionally produced movies, series, books, songs, games, etc., but would be stuck with what's essentially fan art.
Sure, there are talented artists out there who produce music as a hobby, youtubers who make great videos and such, but it would be the end of commercial productions.
That means we'd have no more professionally produced movies, series, books, songs, games, etc., but would be stuck with what's essentially fan art.
we had professionally produced songs and books and games and plays before copyright. you are making that up.
Relatively simple actually, without copyright. Download Spotify, rename app to Spudify, re-upload to app store. Done, easy peasy. Hardest part about it would be decompiling the existing app, which is definitely possible and may not even be necessary.
The real truth is, however, that in this hypothetical world there would be no Spotify to copy and there would be much, much less music available to stream on Spudify.
That would be an update, not sure it would be a good thing. As an artist I want to be able to tell where my work is used and where not. Would suck to find something from me used in fascist propaganda or something.
As an artist I want to be able to tell where my work is used and where not.
that would be nice. a government-enforced monopoly isnt an ethical vehicle to achieve your goal.
I'm open for other ideas, until then I take laws. I don't see anything wrong with people making rules for interactions.
Truly a "Which Way White Man" moment.
I'm old enough to remember people swearing left, right, and center that copyright and IP law being aggressively enforced against social media content has helped corner the market and destroy careers. I'm also well aware of how often images from DeviantArt and other public art venues have been scalped and misappropriated even outside the scope of modern generative AI. And how production houses have outsourced talent to digital sweatshops in the Pacific Rim, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America, where you can pay pennies for professional reprints and adaptations.
It seems like the problem is bigger than just "Does AI art exist?" and "Can copyright laws be changed?" because the real root of the problem is the exploitation of artists generally speaking. When exploitation generates an enormous profit motive, what are artists to do?
Explanation of how this works.
These "AI models" (meaning the free and open Stable Diffusion in particular) consist of different parts. The important parts here are the VAE and the actual "image maker" (U-Net).
A VAE (Variational AutoEncoder) is a kind of AI that can be used to compress data. In image generators, a VAE is used to compress the images. The actual image AI only works on the smaller, compressed image (the latent representation), which means it takes a less powerful computer (and uses less energy). It’s that which makes it possible to run Stable Diffusion at home.
This attack targets the VAE. The image is altered so that the latent representation is that of a very different image, but still roughly the same to humans. Say, you take images of a cat and of a dog. You put both of them through the VAE to get the latent representation. Now you alter the image of the cat until its latent representation is similar to that of the dog. You alter it only in small ways and use methods to check that it still looks similar for humans. So, what the actual image maker AI "sees" is very different from the image the human sees.
Obviously, this only works if you have access to the VAE used by the image generator. So, it only works against open source AI; basically only Stable Diffusion at this point. Companies that use a closed source VAE cannot be attacked in this way.
I guess it makes sense if your ideology is that information must be owned and everything should make money for someone. I guess some people see cyberpunk dystopia as a desirable future. I wonder if it bothers them that all the tools they used are free (EG the method to check if images are similar to humans).
It doesn’t seem to be a very effective attack but it may have some long-term PR effect. Training an AI costs a fair amount of money. People who give that away for free probably still have some ulterior motive, such as being liked. If instead you get the full hate of a few anarcho-capitalists that threaten digital vandalism, you may be deterred. Well, my two cents.
So, it only works against open source AI; basically only Stable Diffusion at this point.
I very much doubt it even works against the multitude of VAEs out there. There's not just the ones derived from StabilitiyAI's models but ones right now simply intended to be faster (at a loss of quality): TAESD can also encode and has a completely different architecture thus is completely unlikely to be fooled by the same attack vector. That failing, you can use a simple affine transformation to convert between latent and rgb space (that's what "latent2rgb" is) and compare outputs to know whether the big VAE model got fooled into generating something unrelated. That thing just doesn't have any attack surface, there's several magnitudes too few weights in there.
Which means that there's an undefeatable way to detect that the VAE was defeated. Which means it's only a matter of processing power until Nightshade is defeated, no human input needed. They'll of course again train and try to fool the now hardened VAE, starting another round, ultimately achieving nothing but making the VAE harder and harder to defeat.
It's like with Russia: They've already lost the war but they haven't noticed, yet -- though I wouldn't be too sure that Nightshade devs themselves aren't aware of that: What they're doing is a powerful way to grift a lot of money from artists without a technical bone in their body.
Those companies don't make the technical details public and I don't follow the leaks and rumors. They almost certainly use, broadly, the same approach (latent diffusion). That is, their AIs work with a compressed version of the image to save on computing power.
Yeah. Not that it's the fault of artists that capitalism exists in its current form. Their art is the fruit of their labor, and therefore, means should be taken to ensure that their labor is properly compensated. And I'm a marxist anarchist, no part of me agrees with any part of the capitalist system. But artists are effectively workers, and we enjoy the fruits of their labor. They are rarely fairly compensated for their work. In this particular instance, under the system we live in, artists rights should be prioritized over
I'm all for janky (getting less janky as time goes on) AI images, but I don't understand why it's so hard to ask artists permission first to use their data. We already maintain public domain image databases, and loads of artists have in the past allowed their art to be used freely for any purpose. How hard is it to gather a database of art who's creators have agreed to let it be used for AI? All the time we've (the collective we) been arguing over thise could've been spent implementing a system to create such a database.
You should check out this article by Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the EFF. The EFF is a digital rights group who recently won a historic case: border guards now need a warrant to search your phone. It should help clear some things up for you.
Fair enough, and I can't claim to be a fan of copyright law or how it's used. Maybe what I'm moreso talking about is a standard of ethics? Or some laws governing the usage of image and text generating AI specifically as opposed to copyright law. Like just straight up a law making it mandatory for AI to provide a list of all the data it used, as well as proof of the source of that data having consented to it's use in training the AI.
There's nothing wrong with being able to use others' copyrighted material without permission though. For analysis, criticism, research, satire, parody and artistic expression like literature, art, and music. In the US, fair use balances the interests of copyright holders with the public’s right to access and use information. There are rights people can maintain over their work, and the rights they do not maintain have always been to the benefit of self-expression and discussion.
It would be awful for everyone if IP holders could take down any review, finding, reverse engineering, or indexes they didn’t like. That would be the dream of every corporation, bully, troll, or wannabe autocrat. It really shouldn’t be legislated.
I'm not talking about IP holders, and I do not agree with copyright law. I'm not having a broad discussion on copyright here. I'm only saying, and not saying anything more, that people who sit down and make a painting and share it with their friends and communities online should be asked before it is scanned to train a model. That's it.
How're we supposed to have things like reviews, research findings, reverse engineering, or indexes if you have to ask first? The scams you could pull if you could attack anyone caught reviewing you. These rights exist to protect us from the monopolies on expression that would increase disparities and divisions, manipulate discourse, and in the end, fundamentally alter how we interact online with each other for the worse.
I'm just gonna ask you to read my above comment again. What I'm suggesting is:
"Before you scrape and analyze art with the specific purpose of making an AI art generator model, you must ask permission from the original creating artist."
Or some laws governing the usage of image and text generating AI specifically as opposed to copyright law.
What you are talking about is an expansion of copyright law. Copyright includes more than just the right to make copies. It also includes the right to authorize derivatives, such as translations of texts, movies based on comics, or games based on movies. Fan art is also a derivative and relies on fair use for its legality (assuming it is legal).
If one were to create an "AI training right", then the natural place to put it, would be with the other rights covered by copyright. Of course, one could lay down such a right outside the copyright statute, and write that it is not part of copyright law.
In any case, it would be intellectual property. The person, who can allow or deny AI training on some work, would own that right as intellectual property.
Yeah, I'm not too concerned with janky AI generators having to ask before training a model on someone's art. Sucks for them I guess.
I don't agree with copyright. I'm an anarchist. I'm openly in favor of piracy, derivative, whatever else a human being might do with something. I don't agree with judicial systems, let alone market economies or even currency as a concept. And that's all fine and dandy, but there are people alive right now under capitalism. Unlike piracy, which pretty much exclusively takes from corporations like the overwhelming majority of things that are pirated are produced by corporate studios and studio funded artists, this one very specific thing takes the most specifically from artists the overwhelming majority of whom are already very poorly compensated many of them literally barely get by at all. AI models should have to ask them to copy and repurpose their works.
That's my only statement. You can assume I effectively don't agree with any other thing. I'm not here to have a long winded nuanced debate about a legal system I don't agree with and am not supporting in literally any capacity. I'm pointing at pixiv the website and saying "hey can you guys like actually ask before you start using these people's shit to make AI that is purposefully built to make sure that they are run out of jobs"
Unless you're going to somehow explain why artists aren't worth existing or something then don't even bother answering. I'm genuinely not interested in what you have to say and am tired of repeating myself in this thread.
I just thought you should know where you stand on the issue. It will make it easier to communicate. Just say that you want to expand copyright to cover AI training and boom. Clear statement. No long winded, nuanced debate needed.
Don't actually know where the hostility comes from. Are you mistaking me for someone else?
I dont want copyright to be expanded, I dont want laws governing intellectual property at all. I've described what I think is right pretty fully. I don't need you to tell me where I stand.
You can read my other comments if you want to engage with it any further. I'm not mistaking you for someone else. I'm just tired of people rehashing the same endless points. Arguing with AI bros is tireless, pointlessly futile. It consistently devolves into innane nonsense. I'm fully on board with doing away with copyright as a concept entirely. My request is that artificial image and text generation be regulated in a way that is ethical with respect to small content creators who should have a say in what software their art is used to generate. That's it fam I'm out
That's not quite right. A traditional worker is someone who operates machines, they don't own, to make products, they don't own. Artists, who are employed, do not own the copyrights to what they make. These employed artists are like workers, in that sense.
Copyrights are "intellectual property". If one needed permission (mostly meaning, pay for it), then the money would go to the property owners. These worker-artists would not receive anything. Note that, on the whole, the owners already made what profit they could expect. Say, if it's stills from a movie, then that movie already made a profit (or not).
People who use their own tools and own their own product (EG artisans in Marx's time) are members of the Petite Bourgeoisie. I think a Marxist analysis of the class dynamics would be fruitful here, but it's beyond me.
The spoilered bit is something I have written about the NYT lawsuit. I think it's illuminating here, too.
::: spoiler spoiler The NYT wants money for the use of its “intellectual property”. This is about money for property owners. When building rents go up, you wouldn’t expect construction workers to benefit, right?
In fact, more money for property owners means that workers lose out, because where else is the money going to come from? (well, “money”)
AI, like all previous forms of automation, allows us to produce more and better goods and services with the same amount of labor. On average, society becomes richer. Whether these gains go to the rich, or are more evenly distributed, is a choice that we, as a society, make. It’s a matter of law, not technology.
The NYT lawsuit is about sending these gains to the rich. The NYT has already made its money from its articles. The authors were paid, in full, and will not get any more money. Giving money to these property owners will not make society any richer. It just moves wealth to property owners for being property owners. It’s about more money for the rich.
If OpenAI has to pay these property owners for no additional labor, then it will eventually have to increase subscription fees to balance the cash flow. People, who pay a subscription, probably feel that it benefits them, whether they use it for creative writing, programming, or entertainment. They must feel that the benefit is worth, at least, that much in terms of money.
So, the subscription fees represent a part of the gains to society. If a part of these subscription fees is paid to property owners, who did not contribute anything, then that means that this part of the social gains is funneled to property owners, IE mainly the ultra-rich, simply for being owners/ultra-rich. :::
why it’s so hard to ask artists permission first to use their data.
SD was trained on images from the internet. Anything. There are screenshots, charts and pure text jpgs in there. There's product images from shopping sites and also just ordinary snapshots that someone posted. The people with the biggest individual contribution are almost certainly professional photographers. SD is not built on what one usually calls art (with apologies to photographers). An influencer who has a lot of good, well tagged images on the net has made a more positive contribution than someone who makes abstract art or stick figure comics. And let's not forget the labor of those who tagged those images.
You could not practically get permission from these tens or hundreds of millions of people. It would really be a shame, because the original SD reveals a lot about the stereotypes and biases on the net.
Using permissively licensed images wouldn't have helped a lot. I have seen enough outrage over datasets with exactly such material. People say, that's not what they had in mind when they gave these wide permissions.
Practically, look at wikimedia. There are so many images there which are "pirated". Wikimedia can just take them down in response to a DMCA notice. Well, you can't remove an image from a trained AI model. It's not in there (if everything has worked). So what now? If that means that the model becomes illegal, then you just can't have a model trained on such a database.
People who use their own tools and own their own product (EG artisans in Marx’s time) are members of the Petite Bourgeoisie. I think a Marxist analysis of the class dynamics would be fruitful here, but it’s beyond me.
Please don't. Marxists, at least Marxist-Leninists, tend to start talking increasing amounts of nonsense once the Petite Bourgeoisie and Lumpen get involved.
In any case the whole thing is (as Marx would tell you, but Marxist ignore) a function of one's societal relations, not of the individual person, or job. That relation might change from hour to hour (e.g. if you have a dayjob), and "does not have an employment contract" doesn't imply "does not depend on capital for survival" -- it's perfectly possible as an artist, or pipe fitter, to own your own means of production (computer, metal tongs) and be, as a contractor, in a very similar relationship to capital as the Lumpen day-labourer: To have no say in the greater work that gets created, to be told "do this, or starve", to be treated as an easily replaceable cog. That may even be the case if you have employees of your own. The question is, and that's why Anarchist analysis >>> Marxist analysis, is whether you're beholden to an unjust hierarchy, in this case, that created by capital ownership, not whether you happen to own a screw driver. As e.g. a farmer you might own millions upon millions in means of production, doesn't mean that supermarket chains aren't squeezing your bones dry and you can barely afford your utility bills. Capitalism is unjust hierarchy all the way up and down.
Well, you can’t remove an image from a trained AI model. It’s not in there (if everything has worked). So what now? If that means that the model becomes illegal, then you just can’t have a model trained on such a database.
I also can't possibly unhear this, doesn't mean that my mind or any music I might compose is illegal. If it is overfitted in my mind and I want to compose music and publish that then I'll have to pay attention that my stuff is sufficiently different, have to run an adversarial model against myself, so to speak, if I don't want to end up having to pay royalties. If I just want to have it bouncing around my head and sing it in the shower then I might be singing copyrighted material, but there's no obligation for me to pay royalties either as many aspects of copyright necessitate things such as publishing or ability to damage the original author's income.
Well, Marx believed that the Petite Bourgeoisie would disappear. Their members, unable to economically compete, would become employed workers. Hasn't happened, though. He also observed that this class emulated the outlook of the Haute Bourgeoisie, the rich. IDK more about that. I find it interesting how vocally in favor of right-wing economic policies some artists are, even though these policies massively favor the rich. The phrase temporarily embarrassed millionaire comes to mind. I'm curious about that, is all.
I like how empathic your anarchist take is but I'm not really sure what to do with it.
I like how empathic your anarchist take is but I’m not really sure what to do with it.
That might be because I didn't give a single bit of advise regarding praxis :)
I'll just leave a link to one of Anark's videos here, though the overall tl;dr of everything is "build the new in the shell of the old without fucking up".
The economics are an unworkable mess but I don't mind having sent him some ad money. Do have anything on how an advanced economy with a high degree of specialization could coordinate production and logistics?
There's different ideas, roughly distinguished between market and council-based, with less and more central planning. The CNT in Spain had a quite market-based approach, for example, but OTOH you see council-type structures even in today's capitalism: The development of lithography technology and machines for that, for example, quickly hit a brick wall, none of the (gigantic) companies working on it were actually large enough to do it so they started cooperating. The label on the machine might say "ASML" but really they're only a systems integrator: They've worked with a multitude of other companies to develop and build exactly the stuff that will be necessary, there's no competition between say Corning and Zeiss who's going to make a particular lens or such: They've agreed, together, to build a certain technology, divided up the work according to their specialities -- including "make money with the machine", that's TSMC's area of expertise. Roughly speaking: The less commodified a particular erm commodity is the more likely it's not actually directly bound by market forces, even in our current economy you get these islands of horizontal cooperation within the larger shark tank. You'll pay money for those machines but money alone might not buy you one, you might need to be part of a syndicate.
But I agree with you (or I think that's your implication) that pure mutualism will not work for these kinds of "put a man on the moon" projects, it's not structured enough and without structure no planning (centralised or decentralised). And frankly speaking the theory around this topic is kinda lacking, first off because much of the theory about it is old, where "big industry" meant "a steel mill", secondly because Anarchism has ceased to plan ahead details: We don't have the necessary knowledge and information to pre-empt the decisions of people down the line, and we shouldn't attempt to, either. They will organise those projects as they see fit in some democratic manner, what's up to us is to grow democracy within the economy to a degree where more and more economic actors jump on the ship, as well as develop abstract frameworks, a body of ideas and approaches in line with Anarchist principles, that they can pick and choose from as they like and circumstances dictate, and develop further. And most of all we need to kill off hierarchical realism, that is, the idea that nothing ever works without an imposed hierarchy even though everyone sees it working all the time when friends get together to have a grill party. Are there scaling issues, sure... but hierarchies have scaling issues, too, even insurmountable ones (mostly around information processing complexity and perverse incentives) and we don't discount them on that basis. There's a strong cultural bias and blind-spot, there.
In a nutshell, it's the old leftist problem: We know exactly what's wrong and also know how things ought to look like to be better, but details, man, details. In the end, in practice, there's no perfect, there's only less bad.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
I'll just leave a link to one of Anark's videos here
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Excited to see the guys that made Nightshade get sued in a Silicon Valley district court, because they're something something mumble mumble intellectual property national security.
They already stole GPLv2 code for their last data poisoning scheme and remain in violation of that license. They're just grifters.
Because the people producing code with GPL are completely unrelated to the AI issues.
You’re asking why you can’t shoot your neighbor if Russians are shooting Ukrainians.
No, I'm asking why they're held to a standard the AI makers are not when they're not even charging for the completely optional tool.
That’s a strawman. AI makers should definitely respect FOSS licenses.
You’re just looking for excuses for their shitty behavior.
The entire premise of the AIs are based on stealing intellectual property, which you'll find cover far more ground than FOSS, but sure, whatever you say, person who definitely knows what a straw man is.
I didn't have that on my 2020 bingo card, but it has been a very long year so everything is possible.
This doesn't work outside of laboratory conditions.
It's the equivalent of "doctors find cure for cancer (in mice)."
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I like that example, everytime you hear about some discovery that x kills 100% of cancer cells in a petri dish. You always have to think, so does bleach.
You ever heard of Miracle Mineral Solution? It's bleach with extra steps and some of the 5G loonies give their autistic kids enemas with it to drive out the "toxins" giving their kids autism.
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It hasn't worked much outside of the laboratory, because they just released it from the laboratory. They've already proven it works in their paper with about 90% effectiveness.
It's clever really, people who don't like ai are very lonelye to also not understand the technology, if you're going to grift then it's a perfect set of rubes - tell them your magic code will defeat the evil magic code of the ai and that's all they need to know, fudge some numbers and they'll throw their money at you
And they never get any money off the back of it...
It's funny how people will willingly forget how the world works when they really want magic to be real.
Its clever really, the people who hate protecting your art from usage you dont approve of are very likely to not understand the technology, if youre going to mock them theyre the perfect set of rubes.
What's not clever is making stuff up to not really make a point after typing a whole paragraph lmao
Apparently people who specialize in AI/ML have a very hard time trying to replicate the desired results when training models with 'poisoned' data. Is that true?
I've only heard that running images through a VAE just once seems to break the Nightshade effect, but no one's really published anything yet.
You can finetune models on known bad and incoherent images to help it to output better images if the trained embedding is used in the negative prompt. So there's a chance that making a lot of purposefully bad data could actually make models better by helping the model recognize bad output and avoid it.
A Variational AutoEncoder is a kind of AI that can be used to compress data. In image generators, a VAE is used to compress the images. The actual image AI works on the smaller, compressed image (the latent representation), which means it takes a less powerful computer (and uses less energy). It's that which makes it possible to run Stable Diffusion at home.
This attack targets the VAE. The image is altered so that the latent representation looks like a very different image, but still roughly the same to humans. The actual image AI works on a different image. Obviously, this only works if you have the right VAE. So, it only works against open source AI; basically only Stable Diffusion at this point. Companies that use a closed source VAE cannot be attacked.
I guess it makes sense if your ideology is that information must be owned and everything should make money for someone. I guess some people see cyberpunk dystopia as a desirable future. It doesn't seem to be a very effective attack but it may have some long-term PR effect. Training an AI costs a fair amount of money. People who give that away for free probably still have some ulterior motive, such as being liked. If instead you get the full hate of a few anarcho-capitalists that threaten digital vandalism, you may be deterred. Well, my two cents.
Thank you for explaining. I work in NLP and are not familiar with all CV acronyms. That sounds like it kind if defeats the purpose if it only targets open source models. But yeah, makes sense that you would need the actual autoencoder in order to learn how to alter your data such that the representation from the autoencoder is different enough.
So there's a chance that making a lot of purposefully bad data could actually make models better by helping the model recognize bad output and avoid it.
This would be truly ironic
If users have verry much control and we can coordinate then you could gaslight the AI into a screwed up alternate reality
Until they come with some preprocessing step, or some better feature extractors etc. This is an arms race like there are many of
The thing is data poisoning is a arms race that the Ai side will win with ease. You can either solve it with pre processing or filtering. All it does is make the images look worse. I can't think of a way that you can poison data that doesn't take more effort to unpoison than to poison.
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It's not FOSS and I don't see a way to review if what they claim is actually true.
It may be a way to just help to diferentiate legitimate human made work vs machine-generated ones, thus helping AI training models.
Can't demostrate that fact neither, because of its license that expressly forbids sofware adaptions to other uses.
Edit, alter, modify, adapt, translate or otherwise change the whole or any part of the Software nor permit the whole or any part of the Software to be combined with or become incorporated in any other software, nor decompile, disassemble or reverse engineer the Software or attempt to do any such things
The EULA also prohibits using Nightshade "for any commercial purpose", so arguably if you make money from your art—in any way—you're not allowed to use Nightshade to "poison" it.
I read the article enough to find that the Nightshade tool is under EULA... :(
Because it definitely is not FOSS, use it with caution, preferably on a system not connected to internet.
In the long run this will only improve the strength of models as they adapt to the changes this introduces and get that much stronger for it.
That's like saying people shouldn't have developed a vaccine for Covid, only because Covid will adapt to the vaccines at some point.
What do you want artists to do? Accept that all their future work is also used without any compensation?
They didn't say it shouldn't have been developed. Improving the AI models so they can deal with this kind of malicious interference gracefully is a good thing.
To be fair, windows and macos are the 2 biggest computer operating systems in the world. It makes a lot more sense to focus on building tools for people using the biggest platforms rather than focus on people using something with a user base fragmented across multiple versions of the same OS.
Though I do agree a version for Linux would be nice. Even if we have the mac equivalent of wine, darling, I don't know enough about it to say whether it's up to the task or not.
It's simple math. 97% of the population uses those two operating systems.
There isn't much more incentive to go after the 3% Linux users. You know the population that loves free and open source software and isn't exactly known for dropping a bunch of cash on software. Not to mention it's a fragmented 3%. Even the flatpak, snap, app images of the world that were supposed to make devs lives easier are fragmented across distros.
No one's doing this kind of work on their android phone, so you're argument is pedantic at best in this context.
If I can patch a ROM on my phone, you can patch your picture just fine. You don't have to make it with your phone.
Also, you'd be surprised at how excellent some drawing apps are on Android. Particularly Ibis.
Meme aside, that's a good question... I wonder how much GNU made it into Google's implementation. Someone here probably knows.
none. Android uses just the Linux kernel, not the GNU user space tools.
That's why Android is normally not counted as Linux, it's basically a different OS using the Linux kernel.
Why develop for developers?
Why wouldn't you?
It's not like developers get off on reinventing the wheel or something. If somebody has a working solution, I'd rather use that than spend time coming up with code on my own. I'm busy enough as it is.
what does being a developer have anything to do with it? Do you really think we only use things we develop ourselves?
Omg, I can't believe you actually just said that. 🤣🤣🤣
Do you know what a library is? How about a language?
Buddy, you’re being cringe on the internet. This is a friendly reminder and a notice about that.
You don’t need to be so toxic like in this comment, or as pedantic and pretentious as in your others in adjacent branches on this thread.
I hate that there’s no way to tell you this without sounding at least partially condescending and/or aggressive or whatever myself, but I promise I’m just trying to provide perspective and a view from a third person experiencing your behavior. I truly wish you the best, friend. You can do better.
big companies already have all your uncorrupted artwork, all this does is eliminate any new competition from cropping up.
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It corrupts the training data to recategorize all images generated in the future. It's not about protecting a single image, that's what glaze is for. This is about making the AI worse at making new images.
"Its over jimmy. They stole the money you made last week. I would pay you for this week, with this money you didnt have yet so it couldnt be stolen, but they already have some of your money. All that would do is make the robbers who took your previous weeks pay have fewer competition."
because supporting monopolies is good? stifling competition and development is good? wut?
Whoda thunk one word isnt enough to describe my feelings lol.
Good as in startups shoukd be allowed to be founded around stolen data.
so, established companies should be allowed to steal from start ups and release their products for less than startups could ever make them, effectively shutting out all competition forever?
or are you just a fucking hypocrite?
No lol, no one should. Me saying AI tech startups shouldnt be allowed to use stolen data means i endorse existing companies who have already stolen it.
But just because companies have already done it also doesnt mean we should be allowing new companies to also do the same thing.
Lmao what? Please, explain to me how thinking neither new companies or existing companies should be allowed to be doing what their doing, is hypocritical.
I bet that before the end of this year this tool will be one of the things that helped improve the performance and quality of AI.
is anyone else excited to see poisoned AI artwork? This might be the element that makes it weird enough.
Also, re: the guy lol'ing that someone says this is illegal - it might be. is it wrong? absolutely not. does the woefully broad computer fraud and abuse act contain language that this might violate? it depends, the CFAA has two requirements for something to be in violation of it.
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the act in question affects a government computer, a financial institution's computer, OR a computer "which is used in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce or communication" (that last one is the biggie because it means that almost 100% of internet activity falls under its auspices)
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the act "knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer;" (with 'protected computer' being defined in 1)
Quotes are from the law directly, as quoted at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act
the poisoned artwork is information created with the intent of causing it to be transmitted to computers across state or international borders and damaging those computers. Using this technique to protect what's yours might be a felony in the US, and because it would be considered intentionally damaging a protected computer by the knowing transmission of information designed to cause damage, you could face up to 10 years in prison for it. Which is fun because the people stealing from you face absolutely no retribution at all for their theft, they don't even have to give you some of the money they use your art to make, but if you try to stop them you go to prison for a decade.
The CFAA is the same law that Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz was prosecuted under. His crime was downloading things from JSTOR that he had a right to download as an account holder, but more quickly than they felt he should have. He was charged with 13 felonies and faced 50 years and over a million dollars in fines alongside a lifetime ban from ever using an internet connected computer again when he died by suicide. The charges were then dropped.
It's not damaging a computer, it's poisoning the models ai uses to create the images. The program will work just fine, and as expected given the model that it has, the difference is the model might not be accurate. It's like saying you're breaking a screen if you're now looking at a low res version of an image
My big thing here is if there's no contract, where is the onus for having correct models? Yah, the models are worth money, but is it the artist or softwares responsible for those correct models? I'd say most people who understand how software works would say software, unless they were corporate shills. Make better software, or pay the artists, the reaction shouldn't be "artists are fooling me, they should pay"
Taking it to an extreme. Say somehow they had this same software back in the 90s, could the generative software sue because all the images were in 256 colors? From your perspective, yes, cause it was messing up their models that are built for many more colors
"Damage to a computer" is legal logorrhoea, possible interpretations range from not even crashing a program to STUXNET, completely under-defined so it's up to the courts to give it meaning. I'm not at all acquainted with US precedent but I very much doubt they'll put the boundary at the very extreme of the space of interpretation, which "causes a program to expose a bug in itself without further affecting functioning in any way" indeed is.
Which is fun because the people stealing from you face absolutely no retribution at all for their theft,
Learning from an image, studying it, is absolutely not theft. Otherwise I shall sue you for reading this comment of mine.
Damage to a computer” is legal logorrhoea
The model is the thing of value that is damaged.
Learning from an image is not theft
But making works derivative from someone else's copyrighted image is a violation of their rights.
So any art done in a style of another artist is theft? Of course not. Learning from looking at others is what all of us do. It’s far more complicated than you’re making it sound.
IMO, If the derivative that the model makes is too close to someone else’s, the person distributing such work would be at fault. Not the model itself.
But again, it’s very nuanced. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out in the courts.
Of course not, but what does this have to do with generative models? Deep learning has as much to do with learning as democratic people's north Korea does with democracy.
The model is the thing of value that is damaged.
It does not get damaged, it stays as it is. Also it's a bunch of floats, not a computer.
But making works derivative from someone else’s copyrighted image is a violation of their rights.
"Derivative work" doesn't mean "inspired by". For a work to be derivative it needs to include major copyrightable elements of the original work(s). Things such as style aren't even copyrightable. Character design is, but then you should wonder whether you actually want to enforce that in non-commercial settings like fanart, even commissioned fanart, if e.g. Marvel doesn't care as long as you're not making movies or actual comics. They gain nothing from there not being, say, a Deadpool version of the Drake meme.
Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 (CFAA) is a United States cybersecurity bill that was enacted in 1986 as an amendment to existing computer fraud law (18 U. S. C. § 1030), which had been included in the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. Prior to computer-specific criminal laws, computer crimes were prosecuted as mail and wire fraud, but the applying law was often insufficient.
^to^ ^opt^ ^out^^,^ ^pm^ ^me^ ^'optout'.^ ^article^ ^|^ ^about^
Ah, another arms race has begun. Just be wary, what one person creates another will circumvent.
They clam a credit to using AI to make the thumbnail..... The same people who did nothing more then ask Chat GPT to make a picture to represent the article on a tool that poisons AI models to protect people who make pictures for a living from having Chat GPT use their work to make; say a picture to represent an article on a tool that poisons AI models......
so it is a bit like playing a sound at 30k Hz to annoy a dog, we cant detect it but the dog can and gets confused
Won't this thing actually help the AI models in the long run? The biggest issue I've heard is the possibility of AI generated images getting into the training dataset, but "poisoned" artworks are basically guaranteed to be of human origin.
Unless you intentionally poison AI generated images and add them to circulation, which is not hard to do nor a great leap of logic to do if you hate AI
As an artist, nightshade is not something I will ever use. All my art is public domain, including AI. Let people generate as many pigeon pictures as they want I say!
Mind explaining what artists it isn't good for? I genuinely don't see why it is so hard to let others remix and remake.
The artists whose stuff was stolen with the intent to profit from replacing their labour with the click of a button.
Do you have a means of securely and reliably getting it? Cause I don't.
You really come across as coming from a place of privilege whilst lamenting that the reason poor people are worried about this is because they're just not as nice as you.
Lmao I have never been rich, in my entire life. It isn't like my art is being directly copied.
Yeah same. Empowering people to be more creative has never stuck me as something that needs to be gatekept. Tools have constantly improved allowing more people to become artists. If it's the copying of styles you're worried about, I'd take it up with every artist that's learned from Picasso or Da Vinci.