Is DPW Adding Code or Cloaking Filters to Deter AI Scraping of our Art?

Hi everyone, I have been reading about how various AI tech is scraping art from websites and using it without payment or permission to train on. I wondered if Daily Paintwork has specific and actionable plans to help prevent AI webscraping, including blocking specific AI crawlers with code added to the backend of the website. I am migrating most of my work to CARA, which is a social media site that is apparently using Glaze to cloak digital artwork to protect it somewhat from being scraped by AI. This is a serious issue for artists–even fine artists–for many reasons, including the principle of the thing. I am betting David and Carol are already thinking about how to protect our art as best they can and I would love to hear what solutions they are implementing.

Lori

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That is a good question! Unfortunately, there is no way to protect an image that is shown in a browser. There is code that can make it less convenient for a human user to download images, however, even that can be easily worked around by a technically savvy user.

My opinion is not to worry about someone using your images, mostly because there isn’t anything that can be done about it. But also because you aren’t selling the images of your art, you are selling the art itself. I think a good attitude is you have to give away your images to sell your art online. The people who buy original art aren’t likely to buy a digital reproduction from someone else, and those that do, aren’t likely to pay for original art.

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Very true. We are in a fortunate position because we create one-of-a-kind originals. People who wanted to buy originals are still going to want to buy originals. AI isn’t going to change that.

This doesn’t mean we can’t use Glaze or Nightshade too. I don’t like the idea of AI gobbling up all of our work for its own nefarious purposes. I feel bad for digital artists who are most affected by all of this.

I would like this kind of protection myself, but it seems nightshade and Glaze are our only options in many arenas. I do both traditional and digital art, and some of us scan our physical work in and do sell reprints. Regardless of that it’s okay also to not want your copywritten property stolen and used for others to collage it and profit. Unfortunately my only solutions so far otherwise has been to post in the few protected places we have and link to them on anywhere else like Facebook and such.

Hi, new here but that’s a question I’ve had for over 20 yrs. after posting hundreds of works so, what are those protected places? Thanks.

To my knowledge the main one that most artists are using is Cara.app who takes steps to prevent AI scraping, mainly but making glaze available through their website, but they explicitly do not allow AI theft. Sadly, like most thieves, AI can still possibly get to it. For the most part the burden of protection is still on us by watermarking/ glaze and nightshade. Otherwise there’s a mobile app in process called overlai that’s supposed to help in ways In still trying to understand.

The danger is that AI can also customize the original work and add a little bit and call it creativity, it will be unfair to real artists and in the future we will suffer extremely serious consequences of AI creativity.
dessin de stitch