Just as text-based GAI engines like Google SGE can plagiarize writers, image-generation tools like Stable Diffusion and Mid-Journey can swipe content from visual artists. Bots (or copycat humans) go out onto the open-web, grab images from artists and use them as training data without consent or compensation to the human who made them. Then, users can go into a prompt and ask for a painting or illustration "in the style" of the original artist.
The taking of art as training data is already the subject of several lawsuits, with a group of artists currently suing Stablity AI, DeviantArt and Midjourney. However, as we wait for the courts and the law to catch up, a group of researchers at the University of Chicago has developed Glaze. This open-source tool shifts pixels around on images, making them more difficult for AIs to ingest. Today, after several months in public beta, Glaze 1.0 has launched.
