Researchers at the University of Chicago have developed an application that protects your works of art from plagiarism by AI. The tool, called Glaze, is available free of charge. Here’s how this solution works, to combat infringement of literary and artistic property rights.
Artists powerless against AI plagiarism
AI has recently been the subject of numerous controversiesparticularly with regard to plagiarism of works of art. Artists are finding that AI feeds off artists’ works of art to create new ones.
Generative AI technology imitates a signature style to reproduce one or more near-similar works. For many, AI not only learns, but also truly plagiarizes human creations who consider this to be theft.
AI would violate literary and artistic property rights in the knowledge that the technology requires no consent before copying or plagiarizing creations or those published online.
AI enthusiasts see generative technology as simply taking inspiration from artists’ creations and styles. The AI then creates its own signature style. Artists cry foul.
Many fear that AI will continue to compete unfairly with artists as technology evolves. For them, there will always be fundamental ethical problems with the art of AI.
American researchers to the rescue of artists
Human artists take time and effort to realize and produce an original work of art. Researchers at the University of Chicago point out the enormous gap between the production time of artists and the speed at which generative AI models realize a creation.
These researchers also denounce AI’s plagiarism of artists’ original works. In response, they designed and developed an application to combat this very form of theft.. The team used the camouflage to protect artists’ creations
Ben Zhao, professor of computer science at the University of Chicago and director of the project explains: “We’re trying to understand how the AI model perceives its own version of what artistic style is. And then we essentially work in that dimension to distort what the model sees as a particular style.”
With this new application available free of charge, the researchers hope to be able to help artists defend their work and creativity against the non-consensual ingestion of AIs. The team also hopes that other researchers will follow suit and develop similar tools to defend human creativity.