How to protect your art from AI scraping

Casey

• 2 min read
Pencil, figure drawings. The text reads:
Glaze can protect your art from AI scraping

At UnVale, we are proudly and loudly anti-AI art, but were always looking for more ways to help artists protect their work.

A blue and purple button with the word "Glaze" in big letters.
Free AI protection tool, Glaze!

We recently came across a tool called Glaze, created by University of Chicago computer science PhD students and professors. Glaze adds small changes, imperceptible to the average viewer, that tricks AI processing into thinking your art is a radically different style, preventing scraping and replication.

From the Glaze website:

“We are not motivated by profit or any political agenda, and our only goal is to explore how ethical security techniques can be utilized to develop practical solutions and (hopefully) help real users."
The image features various steps, with the first step showing an artist's original artwork without Glaze. The next step sends the artwork through Glaze, with the output being a "cloaked" piece of art that is identical to the original art depicted in the first step. The next step shows AI attempting to mimic the cloaked art, which results in an output of odd colors, shapes, and distortions.
Your artwork will appear as a completely different style to AI scraping.

AIs that are “trained” with an image that's been cloaked with Glaze will not be able to recreate your work, hopefully shielding artists from folks being able to “do it in your style” using tools like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney. This is a big step forward towards protecting artists from copyright infringement and art theft using ethically–and publicly funded–technological tools.

Niall, an anthro wolfhound from space, stands grimacing across from Aerora, a celestial being with three eyes, purple hair, and the ability to float above the ground. Between them are swirls of air, as if Niall is attempting to blow Aerora away.
Join our Discord to stay in the loop!

While these AI companies continue to battle in the courts to see if their art theft is legal, we can continue to use the available tools to try and protect ourselves moving forward.

Additionally, using watermarks for public, full res images is a successful measure to protect against AI scraping. Please let us know in our Discord if this is a feature you would love to have on UnVale.

We will keep posting resources that protect artists and creators. Be sure to follow us on social to be kept in the loop!

Much love,

Casey
Cofounder of UnVale