Key points:
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Cara’s Rapid Growth: The app gained 600,000 users in a week
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Artists Leaving Instagram: The controversy around Instagram using images to train AI led many artists to seek an alternative
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Cara’s Features: The app is designed specifically for artists and offers a ‘Portfolio’ feature. Users can tag fields, mediums, project types, categories, and software used to create their work
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While Cara has grown quickly, it is still tiny compared to Instagram’s massive user base of two billion.
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Glaze Integration: Cara is working on integrating Glaze directly in the app to provide users with an easy way to protect their work from be used by any AI
more about: https://blog.cara.app/blog/cara-glaze-about
I don’t understand how this Glaze thing is supposed to stop AI being trained on the art.
It’s not. It’s supposed to target certain open source AIs (Stable Diffusion specifically).
Latent diffusion models work on compressed images. That takes less resources. The compression is handled by a type of AI called VAE. For this attack to work, you must have access to the specific VAE that you are targeting.
The image is subtly altered so that the compressed image looks completely different from the original. You can only do that if you know what the compression AI does. Stable Diffusion is a necessary part of the Glaze software. It is ineffective against any closed source image generators that have trained their own VAE (or equivalent).
This kind of attack is notoriously fickle and thwarted by even small changes. It’s probably not even very effective against the intended target.
If you’re all about intellectual property, it kinda makes sense that freely shared AI is your main enemy.
Not only is this kind of attack notoriously unstable, finding out what images have been glazed is a fantastic indicator for finding high-quality art that is the stuff you want to train on.
I doubt that. Having a very proprietary attitude towards one’s images and making good images are not related at all.
Besides, good training data is to a large extent about the labels.
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I’m sure it works fine in the lab. But it really only targets one specific AI model; that one specific Stable Diffusion VAE. I know that there are variants of that VAE around, which may or may not be enough to make it moot. The “Glaze” on an image may not survive common transformations, such as rescaling the image. It certainly will not survive intentional efforts to remove it, such as appropriate smoothing.
In my opinion, there is no point in bothering in the first place. There are literally billions of images on the net. One locks up gems because they are rare. This is like locking up pebbles on the beach. It doesn’t matter if the lock is bad.
Sort of. The VAE, the compression, means that the image generation takes less compute; ie cheaper hardware and less energy. You can have an image generator that works on the same pixels, visible to humans. Actually, that’s simpler and existed earlier.
By Moore’s law, it would be many years, even decades, before that efficiency gain is something we can do without. But I think, maybe, this becomes moot once special accelerator chips for neural nets are designed.
What makes it obsolete is the proliferation of open models. EG Today Stable Diffusion 3 becomes available for download. This attack targets 1 specific model and may work on variants of it. But as more and more rather different models become available, the whole thing becomes increasingly pointless. Maybe you could target more than one, but it would be more and more effort for less and less effect.