[nickvincent]

IMO - this kind of tool cuts across a debate that currently involves a lot of people yelling past each other.

If you're an artist, of course you can make changes to your process or your content that modify how it's used. To argue otherwise is analogous to arguing we must always be mindful to stay in the surveillance cameras' view when walking about the streets.

Yes, it's a never-ending back-and-forth game that the obfuscater will probably lose in the long run (though abstractly, an obfuscation technique with >50% adoption could "win" long-term) . And yes, it's important to stay apprised about how effective such tools are.

But in the short term, the existence of these tools provides a critical counter-measure to the current narrative, which is basically that everything that can be scraped will be scraped. Returning to the cameras & streets analogy, obfuscation tools are maps that tell us about routes out of view of the cameras (even though these routes may often be blocked off or inconvenient).

Whether you hate AI art or love it, I honestly believe both sides can get behind understanding obfuscation and poisoning and making tools available: those opposed will use the tools, those who want to improve generative AI can learn from the counter-measures, etc. This kind of thing can be part of a healthy deliberative process around these emerging technologies.

[ismokedoinks]

I agree, I think that a lot of discourse on this website is grounded in critiquing people's misconceptions about these AI models when in reality accepting the concerns of writers, artists, consumers of online content, etc and offering them even superficial peace of mind is much more conducive to gaining popular support at a broader scale than teaching people how they work.

[itronitron]

>> offering them even superficial peace of mind is much more conducive to gaining popular support at a broader scale than teaching people how they work.

While that has been the tried and true formula for tech companies attitudes towards their users/customers I'm not sure that will work in this case since artists are on the supply side of the equation.

[itronitron]

>> those who want to improve generative AI can learn from the counter-measures

The fact that people think generative AI will improve its output by learning from the obfuscating counter-measures just drives home the point that the AI is just copying the work of others without their consent.

[XorNot]

Or it accelerates the endpoint: cutting the pre-made art out of the process entirely.

AI image generators don't need to see art, they just need to know what blobs of pixels "are" in relation to words. That sort of data can be extracted from just photography of the real world - it just turns out there's a lot less of that easily available and properly tagged then art collections right now.

There's more then enough public-domain examples of "style" to do the rest (and style-transfer was one of the original AI image manipulation applications).