AI is Here For Good or Bad - So Pay Attention - Fall 2023
It is inevitable AI is here and we have no choice to deal with it. This technology seems to be parallel to what we see in the forensic examination of art. At one point the bad guys are ahead.. then the god guys figure it out and they lead until the bad guys counter and they lead until the next cycle. There will be great benefits and much misery. My only worry is that AI will take control and stop the cycle. That is the issue they are working on today. Regardless AI is a fascinating life changing movement.
A New Tool Helps Artists Thwart AI—With a Middle Finger
Kudurru, the new tool from the creator of Have I Been Trained?, can help artists block web scrapers and even “poison” the scraping by sending back the wrong image.
WHEN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE image generators first rolled out, they seemed like magic. Churning out detailed imagery in minutes was, from one angle, a technical marvel. From another angle, though, it looked like mere mimicry.
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The models were trained on billions of images without anyone asking the humans behind them for permission. “They have sucked the creative juices of millions of artists,” says Eva Toorenent, an illustrator who serves as the Netherlands adviser for the European Guild for Artificial Intelligence Regulation. “It is absolutely horrifying.”
As AI company valuations soared, the people whose work provided the bedrock for their products saw no compensation. Many artists ardently oppose how AI image generators use their work. “To see corporations scrape our style and then attempt to replace us with bastardized versions of our own work is beyond disgusting,” artist and writer Molly Crabapple says.
Over the past year, as image-generating AI tools have grown in popularity, illustrators, photographers, and other visual artists have struggled to determine what they can do to have a say in how their work is used. Some are attempting lawsuits, others are asking regulators to step in. There’s nothing they can do to change how generators have been trained in the past. Starting today, though, the startup Spawning is launching a new tool to help artists who want to block new attempts to train AI on their work. Called Kudurru, it is a network of websites that identifies web scraping as it’s happening. (The name comes from a Mesopotamian term for stones that denoted boundaries and ownership.)
IT’S HELPFUL TO know how image generators are trained to understand exactly how Kudurru works. Most of these generators find their training data by “scraping” the internet. Scrapers use software that collects data in bulk from across the web, from platforms like DeviantArt and professional libraries like Getty Images to individual artists’ websites. One of the most popular and most commonly used roadmaps to decide what to scrape is the dataset LAION-5B, which lists the URLs to billions of images. When an AI company uses a dataset like LAION-5B to scrape images, it has to download those images from the URL links. That’s where Kudurru finds its opening.
According to Spawning cofounder Jordan Meyer, during internal testing, Kudurru was able to briefly stymie a substantial amount of scraping activity. “For about two hours in July, we stopped everyone who was in the process of downloading the LAION-5B dataset,” Meyer says.
