The developers of two new copyright protection tools are helping artists defend themselves against generative artificial intelligence.

For those who have ever played around with modern image generators based on artificial intelligence (AI), it can seem like an almost magical experience; in reality, however, these programs are more like a magic trick than magic.

Without the art created by hundreds of thousands of people, these programs wouldn’t work. But these artists aren’t being compensated, and many of them are even being put out of business by the very programs that their work created.

Now two computer scientists from the University of Chicago, Ben Zhao and Heather Zheng, are fighting back.

They have developed two programs called Glaze and Nightshade that provide a kind of “poison pill” to protect against generative AI tools like Midjourney and DALL-E and help artists protect their original copyrighted works. Their work could also revolutionize the way we all relate to these systems.

In this episode of the Big Brains podcast, the scientists explain their work and the problems with AI image generators:

Read the transcript of this episode. Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Source: University of Chicago