Unfortunately, visual artists are not unionized across their industry in the same way writers and actors are. But they have been using other tools to try to protect their work from shoddy automated replacements. In a clever, pro-technology Luddite strategy, University of Chicago computer scientists, with the aid of several visual artists, developed two tools to combat ingestion into the datasets that train image synthesis models. One of them, Glaze, is a "defensive" tool that artists can use to protect their work from being mimicked without their consent. It's like a filter atop of an image that renders it unusable in model training. Meanwhile, Nightshade is an "offensive" filter that not only renders one particular image unusable, but can actually ruin these models at training time. Like the plants of its namesake, images treated with Nightshade actually poison the dataset a would-be Al model create.

— The AI Con by Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna (17%)