• vsis@feddit.cl
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    7 months ago

    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

    sauce: https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/downloads.html

    • nybble41@programming.dev
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      7 months ago

      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.

      • Nommer@sh.itjust.works
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        7 months ago

        This is the part most people will ignore but I get that’s it’s mainly meant for big actors.

    • Margot Robbie@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      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.

      • Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        7 months ago

        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.

      • hperrin@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        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.

        • fidodo@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          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.

          • bamboo@lemm.ee
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            7 months ago

            It’s piracy, distributing copyrighted works against the terms of its license. I agree stealing is not really the right word.

  • Zealousideal_Fox900@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    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!

      • Zealousideal_Fox900@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        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.

        • beebarfbadger@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          The artists whose stuff was stolen with the intent to profit from replacing their labour with the click of a button.

        • Drewelite@lemmynsfw.com
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          7 months ago

          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.

            • Mustard@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              7 months ago

              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.

      • Zeon@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Well, if you can’t beat them, join them! You have to adjust to the pace of what society is moving towards.

        • Ann Archy@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          What if it’s adjusting towards segregation and fascism? Should we go for that too?

          • Zeon@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            Seriously? This literally has nothing to do with segregation and facism.

  • ScaredDuck@sopuli.xyz
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    7 months ago

    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.

    • XTornado@lemmy.ml
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      7 months ago

      I didn’t have that on my 2020 bingo card, but it has been a very long year so everything is possible.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      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.

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            7 months ago

            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.

            • DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe
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              7 months ago

              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.

              • hansl@lemmy.world
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                7 months ago

                That’s a strawman. AI makers should definitely respect FOSS licenses.

                You’re just looking for excuses for their shitty behavior.

                • DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe
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                  7 months ago

                  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.

  • gapbetweenus@feddit.de
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    7 months ago

    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.

  • SPRUNT@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    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?

    • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      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.

      • Bonehead@kbin.social
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        7 months ago

        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.

    • Buttons@programming.dev
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      7 months ago

      Mbyae try siunlhffg the mldide lterets of ervey wrod? I wnedor waht taht deos to a luaangge medol?

    • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      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.

  • M0oP0o@mander.xyz
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    7 months ago

    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…

  • kromem@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    This doesn’t work outside of laboratory conditions.

    It’s the equivalent of “doctors find cure for cancer (in mice).”

    • bier@feddit.nl
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      7 months ago

      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.

      • Meowoem@sh.itjust.works
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        7 months ago

        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

  • General_Effort@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    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.

    • barsoap@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      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.

    • LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      7 months ago

      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.

      • General_Effort@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        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.

        • barsoap@lemm.ee
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          7 months ago

          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.

          • General_Effort@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            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.

  • bonus_crab@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    big companies already have all your uncorrupted artwork, all this does is eliminate any new competition from cropping up.

    • wildginger@lemmy.myserv.one
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      7 months ago

      “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.”

        • BoneALisa@lemm.ee
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          7 months ago

          Whoda thunk one word isnt enough to describe my feelings lol.

          Good as in startups shoukd be allowed to be founded around stolen data.

          • ASeriesOfPoorChoices@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            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?

            • BoneALisa@lemm.ee
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              7 months ago

              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.

                • BoneALisa@lemm.ee
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                  6 months ago

                  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.

    • Jyek@lemmynsfw.com
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      7 months ago

      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.

  • Telodzrum@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Fascinating that they develop this tool and then only release Windows and MacOS versions.

      • zarkanian@sh.itjust.works
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        7 months ago

        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.