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Reminder that this is made by Ben Zhao, the University of Chicago professor who stole open source code for his last data poisoning scheme.
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.
Pardon my ignorance but how do you steal code if it’s open source?
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.
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.
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.
Mbyae try siunlhffg the mldide lterets of ervey wrod? I wnedor waht taht deos to a luaangge medol?
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.
Begun, the AI Wars have.
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.
If their targets don’t care about intellectual property, why should they?
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.
This doesn’t work outside of laboratory conditions.
It’s the equivalent of “doctors find cure for cancer (in mice).”
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.
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
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.
copyright laws need to be abolished
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.
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 not. People are just afraid of being replaced, especially when they weren’t that original or creative in the first place.
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.
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.”
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
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.
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.
“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.
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big companies already have all your uncorrupted artwork, all this does is eliminate any new competition from cropping up.
“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.”
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.
Good
because supporting monopolies is good? stifling competition and development is good? wut?
Only if I respect the product, buddy.
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.
fuck you’re a stupid piece of shit. you’re a fucking hypocrite.
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.
Fascinating that they develop this tool and then only release Windows and MacOS versions.
Aren’t Linux people usually programmers anyway? Why develop for developers?
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.
I hope every artist starts using it.
AI art isn’t real art.
Your opinion, not a fact. Most art is as derivative or more than AI art.
No, that’s fact. AI-generated images aren’t art. They’re hallucinations without meaning or purpose.
Just because some creator (or in your words hallucinator) did not intend meaning, does not prohibit or somehow prevent any beholder to still derive or instill meaning. Your weird comment is also art. The webpage or app we are viewing it on is art. Remember this?. The definition you use may suit you personally, but words are for communicating with others, and to most others it’s definition will be crucially different than yours. Consider adjusting your view or the words you use.
Stupid opinion. If I ask AI to draw an image, that has no meaning or purpose? So if I did the exact same thing with a pencil then it’s suddenly art? AI is just a tool and people like you need to get over it or fully commit and say anything digital isn’t art because a computer really did it. Anything made in Photoshop can’t be art according to you because a program made it. Blender renders aren’t art because a computer generated it. All you did in either case was tell it what to do.
Do you reply to people this way in person ?
If they’re stupid yes.
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!
That’s great for you, truly it is, but for others it’s not.
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.
Believe it or not I need to eat food. Crazy I know.
Oh hey nice! So do I!
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.
