While witnessing rapid technological progress, the lines between human creativity and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities are becoming increasingly blurred.
As AI gets better, there’s a bigger risk that someone might manipulate or change an artist’s work without consent.
So, is there any how to protect your artwork from being copied by AI art generators and preserve your creativity?
Fortunately, yes, and we will discuss more about them in our blog. Without any delay, let’s begin.
How to Protect Your Art From AI Generators and Their Training
Art is deeply personal, as it reflects the thoughts, emotions, and experiences of its creator. However, no artist can display his art without the fear of it getting manipulated by AI.
With the methods mentioned below, you can opt out of training AI art generators and protect your original pieces.
Method 1: Use Opt-Out Preference: DeviantArt
DeviantArt has been at the forefront among art hosting platforms by offering users the ability to choose to opt out of their artwork. No image uploaded to DeviantArt is included in image datasets unless users have explicitly chosen to opt in.
1. Go to the official website of DeviantArt, Sign up, and create an account.
2. Select your preferred artwork and then state your purpose to be on this website.
3. Now go to Posts and post the art that you want to safeguard from AI datasets.
Also Read: Can I Delete My DeviantArt Account?
Method 2: Use AI Opt-Out Tool: Have I Been Trained
Spawning, a collective of artists, operates the widely-used website, Have I Been Trained? It lets you check if your images are included in the LAION-5B dataset, a large-scale dataset for research purposes consisting of 5,85B CLIP-filtered image-text pairs. Moreover, the website has also integrated an option to opt out of this dataset.
1. Visit the Have I Been Trained website.
2. Type your artist name in the search bar and press Enter to find all the copied and similar art created online in the results.
3. To opt out, create an account by clicking on Sign In at the top-right corner.
4. Now, check the box below the image you want to opt out of and select the Do Not Train option at the top-right corner.
That image will added to a Do Not Train list and will now go through a human verification process for further online usage.
Note: Opt-out requests are only effective with organizations that honor these requests.
Method 3: Block Website Crawlers With Robots.txt
Website crawlers are software programs designed to help search engines such as Google discover and index relevant information available on the web. While they help the Internet to locate specific data, some crawlers collect images from websites to build databases used for training artificial intelligence systems.
You can block website crawlers with Robots.txt and Google has provided a guide on How to write and submit a robots.txt file that explains each step in detail.
Note: This process should be done very carefully and under the guidance of your website developer.
Option 1: Block Everything
To prevent all search engine robots from exploring certain parts of your website, you can include the following line in your robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Option 2: Block a Specific URL
You can also block a specific URL to stop them from exploring certain parts of your website by adding a specific line to your robots.txt file.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /private.html
User agent is the name of the website you want to block.
For example, if you want to block ChatGPT then write User-agent: GPTBot.
Note: This method only works if the AI company bots follow your robots.txt directives. Unfortunately, many do not.
Also Read: How to Use Imagen AI by Google
Method 4: Use a WordPress Plugin to Block Bots
If you use WordPress for your portfolio, there are plugins available that aim to stop bots in their tracks and protect your art from AI generators.
Out of many good WordPress plugins, one such is Malcare which works efficiently in keeping the bots away from your content.
1. Open your WordPress dashboard and navigate to the Plugins section.
2. Click on the Add New button located at the top of the page.
3. In the search bar on the right side, type Block Spam bots and hit Enter.
4. Browse through the search results to find the plugin that suits your needs, install it, and then activate it for use.
Method 5: Copyright Your Work
It’s best to officially register them with the U.S. Copyright Office as it gives strong proof that you own the artwork and makes it easier to take legal action against anyone who copies or uses them without your consent.
1. Go to Copyright.gov and click Learn More in the Register Your Works section.
2. Create an account or log in if you already have one.
3. Select Standard Application under the Register a Work heading on the left.
4. Click Start Registration and choose Work of the Visual Arts from the dropdown menu.
5. Confirm your agreement with the terms and hit Continue.
6. Provide a legal title for your photo, fill in the required information, click Add to Cart, and proceed to Pay.gov to complete the payment and seal the deal.
Also Read: Artificial Intelligence and its Impact on Legal Technology
Method 6: Aggressive Watermarking
Now this is done to make sure that if anyone uses the image without permission, it still shows who originally created it.
Make sure to add large-sized overlaid logos or texts to confuse AI training sets and hence protect your art from generators accurately replicating them.
You can refer to our guide How to Automatically Add Watermark to Photos for a step-by-step explanation.
How to Opt-Out of AI through Artist and Creative Content Owner Opt-Out Form
If you want to stop AI programs from stealing your art, you usually have to fill out the Artist and Creative Content Owner Opt-Out Form to complete the process.
Different AI tools have different rules, but here’s how you can opt out of some common ones.
1. OpenAI DALL-E
OpenAI allows creators to exclude their work from the training data used for DALL-E 3, its latest AI image generator.
1. Go to the DALL-E 3 official website, scroll down to find the Creative control heading on the homepage, and there you will get the form link hyperlinked to the text opt their images out.
2. Click on the hyperlink and the form will open in a new tab. Fill in the information required and describe your image.
3. Upload the image you want to remove and provide your Electronic Signature.
4. Finally, click on Submit.
Note: You need to fill out a separate form for each image you want to be deleted. Also, if OpenAI agrees to an artist’s or owner’s request to opt-out, it will only affect future training data for DALL-E.
Also Read: How to Use DALL E to Create AI Images
2. Meta
Meta is using data from its products and services to train its generative AI models. This means that anything personal you upload or have previously uploaded to platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Threads can be used for AI training purposes.
To protect your data from Meta’s AI:
1. Visit the Meta Generative AI Data Subject Rights webpage and select the option that best describes your request.
2. Fill out the additional information such as your name, email, photo, and description, and click on Send to complete your request.
Top Tools that Protect Artists From AI Image Generators
Many tools are there that protect artists from AI image generators and help keep their creative work safe from being used without permission by artificial intelligence.
These tools include different solutions to deal with problems caused by AI-generated content. Here are some top ones:
1. Glaze
Glaze is a system made to safeguard human artists by interfering with style imitation. It uses machine learning techniques to apply a series of small alterations to artworks. These changes make the art look the same to humans but drastically different from AI models in terms of style.
2. Nightshade
Nightshade, developed by the team that created Glaze, follows a similar but more extreme method. It transforms images into poison for generative AI models by playing a little with the image pixels.
Refer to our guide to understand how to use Glaze and Nightshade to protect your art from AI.
3. Kudurru
Kudurru works by detecting active web scrapers on protected websites and then alerts the network to block or redirect all requests from the scraper while it’s scraping.
Its initial plugin for WordPress enabled websites to join Kudurru’s network effortlessly with just a few clicks. Currently, they’re working on creating user-friendly plugins for other web providers.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Q1. Are AI art generators illegal?
Ans. Even though AI art generators are legal, the images used to teach the AI algorithms are usually owned by real human artists. This means there might be copyright issues involved when making AI-generated art.
Q2. Can AI-generated art be detected?
Ans. Yes, AI-generated art can sometimes be detected through various means. One common method is through careful examination of the artwork itself for patterns, inconsistencies, or characteristics that are typical of AI-generated content.
Additionally, metadata of digital files or information provided by the creator may also indicate whether the art was generated by AI.
Q3. Is it OK to sell AI-generated art?
Ans. Yes, AI-generated art can be sold, and it’s completely okay to sell them just like any other artwork.
Even though technology and art are interlinked to each other in tricky ways, as an artist, it is important to stay updated about AI ethics and copyright, to deal with the challenges and make sure your art stays true and valued.
We hope our guide helped you understand the various ways you can protect your art from AI.
Share your thoughts in the comments and stay tuned to TechCult for more informative tech-related blogs.