COMPUTER SCIENCE professor Ben Zhao is on a mission to prevent ‘style mimicry’: users requesting generative outputs that compete with an artist’s distinctive look. In an interview recorded for the Creators Emergency Summit, convened by Charting Gen AI and hosted by law firm Addleshaw Goddard, Ben tells us how his team at the University of Chicago invented AI-defeating tools Glaze and Nightshade, and why he’s now branching out to AI music detection.
In the interview, creators’ hero Ben refers to Belgian illustrator Kim Van Deun, whose email to him in 2022 prompted him to apply knowledge gained from his earlier tools fighting the “overreach of technology” to help artists take on AI-generated substitutes. Ben also refers to conceptual artist Karla Ortiz — who is suing image generators Stability, Midjourney, DeviantArt, and Runway over copyright infringement — as he explains how Glaze makes her art look substantially different in the ‘eyes’ an AI model.
It does that by applying a ‘cloak’ invisible to the human eye. In the examples above a Vincent van Gogh cloak has been applied to Karla’s images, so now when users request images in her style they instead get Van Gogh AI clones. Nightshade works by actively poisoning AI models by inserting objects into shaded areas of images. As Ben talks about music he mentions HarmonyCloak, an AI-defeating tool for musicians developed by a team of computer scientists led by Jian Liu, now at the University of Georgia.
Ben is a rarity within his profession. He understands the issues that creators face, and is committed to helping their cause. When I asked him “Why?” he replied: “Basic human empathy,” adding:
“Human creativity ... it’s the best of us. It’s going to be a dark world where we’re just consuming regurgitated content from AI slop over and over again for the rest of our lives.”
The world needs more Ben Zhaos.
You can download Glaze here, and Nightshade here.
▪️Stay tuned for more coverage on the Creators Emergency Summit soon.
