Artificial Intelligence. Will it lead to dramatic improvements for future generations, will it destroy the world? The jury’s still out on that one, but one thing we do know is that AI has some serious potential as a creative tool. Especially if you like stealing other people’s artwork.

What’s that? You don’t like that? Well, neither do digital artists, whose work is often fed into AI generators to create new pieces in their “style”, who don’t get any pay or credit for the new images, and whose business and reputation can decline due to low-quality copies of their work floating around on the web. Needless to say, with the rise of AI, there has been a proportionate rise of issues and concerns in the digital art world.

Well, modern problems require modern solutions, and a team of faculty and students at the university of Chicago has realized that. To combat theft a la AI, they have elected to fight fire with fire and use… more AI. Composed of computer science faculty and graduate students, and taking feedback from multiple digital artists, the group from Chicago U has created Glaze. As they put it on their website, “Glaze is a system designed to protect human artists by disrupting style mimicry. At a high level, Glaze works by understanding the AI models that are training on human art, and using machine learning algorithms, computing a set of minimal changes to artworks, such that it appears unchanged to human eyes, but appears to AI models like a dramatically different art style.”

Pretty cool, huh? Now because AI is… well, AI, it learns, and will probably get around Glaze at some point. But the creators’ hope is that Glaze will provide protection for at least the amount of time it takes for new regulations concerning AI to be created. Which goes to show that even a temporary solution is, in fact, still a solution if you think ahead.

Ultimately, I think Glaze is an entrepreneurial endeavor at its finest. The team saw a problem growing with AI, and used any tools necessary to find a solution (also AI!) until a more permanent fix could be created. Furthermore, Glaze is supported by grants, and free for any artist to use, making it much more effective at solving the problem. If you are interested in further reading, and also can understand computer-y language, I highly recommend you check the team out here.

And as always, thank you for reading!