A new technique called LightShed will make it harder for artists to use existing protective tools to stop their work from being ingested for AI training. It’s the next step in a cat-and-mouse game—across technology, law, and culture—that has been going on between artists and AI proponents for years. 

Generative AI models that create images need to be trained on a wide variety of visual material, and data sets that are used for this training allegedly include copyrighted art without permission. This has worried artists, who are concerned that the models will learn their style, mimic their work, and put them out of a job.

To be clear, the researchers behind LightShed aren’t trying to steal artists’ work. They just don’t want people to get a false sense of security. “You will not be sure if companies have methods to delete these poisons but will never tell you,” says Hanna Foerster, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge and the lead author of a paper on the work. And if they do, it may be too late to fix the problem.

AI models work, in part, by implicitly creating boundaries between what they perceive as different categories of images. Glaze and Nightshade change enough pixels to push a given piece of art over this boundary without affecting the image’s quality, causing the model to see it as something it’s not. These almost imperceptible changes are called perturbations, and they mess up the AI model’s ability to understand the artwork.

Glaze makes models misunderstand style (e.g., interpreting a photorealistic painting as a cartoon). Nightshade instead makes the model see the subject incorrectly (e.g., interpreting a cat in a drawing as a dog). Glaze is used to defend an artist’s individual style, whereas Nightshade is used to attack AI models that crawl the internet for art.

Foerster worked with a team of researchers from the Technical University of Darmstadt and the University of Texas at San Antonio to develop LightShed, which learns how to see where tools like Glaze and Nightshade splash this sort of digital poison onto art so that it can e...