the darling Glaze “anti-ai” watermarking system is a grift that stole code/violated GPL license (that the creator admits to). It uses the same exact technology as Stable Diffusion. It’s not going to protect you from LORAs (smaller models that imitate a certain style, character, or concept)
An invisible watermark is never going to work. “De-glazing” training images is as easy as running it through a denoising upscaler. If someone really wanted to make a LORA of your art, Glaze and Nightshade are not going to stop them.
If you really want to protect your art from being used as positive training data, use a proper, obnoxious watermark, with your username/website, with “do not use” plastered everywhere. Then, at the very least, it’ll be used as a negative training image instead (telling the model “don’t imitate this”).
There is never a guarantee your art hasn’t been scraped and used to train a model. Training sets aren’t commonly public. Once you share your art online, you don’t know every person who has seen it, saved it, or drawn inspiration from it. Similarly, you can’t name every influence and inspiration that has affected your art.
I suggest that anti-AI art people get used to the fact that sharing art means letting go of the fear of being copied. Nothing is truly original. Artists have always copied each other, and now programmers copy artists.
Capitalists, meanwhile, are excited that they can pay less for “less labor”. Automation and technology is an excuse to undermine and cheapen human labor—if you work in the entertainment industry, it’s adapt AI, quicken your workflow, or lose your job because you’re less productive. This is not a new phenomenon.
You should be mad at management. You should unionize and demand that your labor is compensated fairly.
So that first thing isn’t what you think it is. Anyone can use GPL’ed code for whatever they want. The trick is that they have to distribute the modifications they made when requested, (if and only if they distribute the program.)
I can sit here and use GPL’ed code all day, but as long as I don’t distribute the compiled code or allow people access to any source code modifications (if I release the object code) I’m in the clear.
Even then, if you don’t do that its not stealing. Its failure to comply with the licensing terms, so some sort of copyright infringement. But also literally in the tweet you linked:
We are releasing the source code for Glaze front end, and also working on a rewrite of the frontend.
Assuming they did that, in the 29 days after they said they would do that, it squares them with Section 8 of the GPL:
Moreover, your license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated permanently if the copyright holder notifies you of the violation by some reasonable means, this is the first time you have received notice of violation of this License (for any work) from that copyright holder, and you cure the violation prior to 30 days after your receipt of the notice.
We have done a clean from scratch rewrite of the glaze front end, and also made a detailed pass through all remaining code to ensure there was no code from any GPL projects.
