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Tool preventing AI mimicry cracked; artists wonder what’s next

arstechnica.com Tool preventing AI mimicry cracked; artists wonder what’s next

Artists must wait weeks for Glaze defense against AI scraping amid TOS updates.

Tool preventing AI mimicry cracked; artists wonder what’s next

But just as Glaze's userbase is spiking, a bigger priority for the Glaze Project has emerged: protecting users from attacks disabling Glaze's protections—including attack methods exposed in June by online security researchers in Zurich, Switzerland. In a paper published on Arxiv.org without peer review, the Zurich researchers, including Google DeepMind research scientist Nicholas Carlini, claimed that Glaze's protections could be "easily bypassed, leaving artists vulnerable to style mimicry."

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  • Glaze has always been fundamentally flawed and a short term bandage. There’s no way you can make something appear correctly to a human and incorrectly to a computer over the long term - the researchers will simply retrain on the new data.

    • Agreed. It was fun as a thought exercise, but this failure was inevitable from the start. Ironically, the existence and usage of such tools will only hasten their obsolescence.

      The only thing that would really help is GDPR-like fines (based as a percentage of income, not profits), for any company that trains or willingly uses models that have been trained on data without explicit consent from its creator.

      • That would "help" by basically introducing the concept of copyright to styles and ideas, which I think would likely have more devastating consequences to art than any AI could possibly inflict.

        • No, Just the concept of getting a say in who can train AIs on your creations.

          So yes, that would leave room for a loophole where a human could recreate your creation (without just making a copy), and they could then train their model on that. It isn't water tight. But it doesn't need to be, just better than what we have now.

          • That's the same thing. Whatever you want to call it, "copyright" or some other word, the end result is that you're wanting to give people the right to control other people's ability to analyze the things that they see on public display. And control what general concepts other people put into future works.

            I really don't see how going in that direction is going to lead to a better situation than we have now. Frankly it looks more like a path to a nightmarish corporate-controlled dystopia to me.

            • you're wanting to give people the right to control other people's ability to analyze the things that they see on public display.

              For the second time, that's not what I want to do - I pretty much said so explicitly with my example.

              Human studying a piece of content - fine.
              Training a Machine Learning model on that content without the creator's permission - not fine.

              But if you honestly think that a human learning something, and a ML model learning something are exactly the same, and should be treated as such, this conversation is pointless.

              • Again, it's fundamentally the same thing. You're just using different tools to perform the same action.

                I remember back in the day when software patents were the big boogeyman of the Internet that everyone hated, and the phrase "...with a computer" was treated with great derision. People were taking out huge numbers of patents that were basically the same as things people had been doing since time immemorial but by adding the magical "...with a computer" suffix on it they were treating it like some completely new innovation.

                Suddenly we're on the other side of that?

                Anyway, even if you do throw that distinction in you still end up outlawing huge swathes of things that we've depended on for years. Search engines as the most obvious example.

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