Nightshade
Guys, this is really easy. I just ran my first render on Nightshade, and it's very simple to use.
It's software to "poison" the AI image-"generating" models which scrape your art without permission. It works by telling the AI software that this car is really a cow, or something similarly improbable, so that someone using that scraped art to "generate" a car will get a cow instead. This makes stealing art dangerous and costly and ineffective.
Thieving tech-bro: "That's so mean! They're poisoning our data!"
Hey, you know the absolutely guaranteed way to make sure you don't eat brownies full of laxatives? Don't steal brownies out of someone else's lunch in the break room fridge. This will only poison data that's stolen. Be ethical, be unaffected.
Download Nightshade here.
First, you can choose how intense to make the poison. :D It does increase render time, but that's okay, we know wars aren't won in a moment.
You can specify a tag for your primary image content ("fire," "rabbit," "forest," etc.) to establish content for the scrapers, and it reminds you to use this tag in the alt text and description, and in the post, for maximum impact.
Nightshade takes a while to download and then again to update libraries on first open, but that's a one-time thing. And then it takes a while to render, but again, we are here to preserve art and save the internet, so I can wait a bit to post.
And the output quality is good! Allegedly there are some image effects, but I'm not good enough to spot the difference when I have the before and after together.
- The guide says to run Nightshade last, after resizing, watermarking, etc. This will be most effective.
- Do Nightshade before Glaze, if you choose to do both.
- Render in PNG for best results but it's okay to convert to JPG after.
- Remember to use your content tag in alt test, description, and your post! This is exactly where you'd be putting accessibility text anyway, so it's good practice with or without Nightshade.
Please share, please protect!
Note: I'm not an artist, I'm a writer, but I'm using Nightshade on promo images I'm putting together for a future project, because those software companies didn't buy that stock art either and I won't make it available to them for free on the license I purchased.
Please share, please protect!
(Now, speaking as a writer, I wish we had something similar for text!)
