as you may or may not know, recently, GLAZE was finally released. it's a free tool made by Professor Ben Zhao of University of Chicago and his team to prevent AI models from plagiarizing the style of a particular artist.
here is the relevant twitter thread: https://twitter.com/ravenben/status/1636131323847868418?s=20
it works by introducing small visual changes to the image barely visible to the human eye but very visible to the algorithm, and screw up the output of AI trying to imitate the image or the style as a reslut. it was tested with more than 100 artists (including Karla Ortiz who is behind the fundraiser to protect artists from AI, and one of the 3 people who sued Stable Diffusion for IP infringement back in January). you can see the twitter thread for more exemple or discussions. as well as the FAQ on the site: https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/
it is fully free and runs locally (no internet or account required, no upload of the image anywhere during the process).
My proposal is simple and Radical:
Make usage of GLAZE Mandatory on all images uploaded on Danbooru from now on. all non-glazed images should be rejected.
and, as much as possible, try to progressively replace older-uploaded images with Glazed versions.
the reason for this is simple: while danbooru has had a strict policy against AI-images pretty much from the start (good thing) and the community actively deletes AI images uploaded on the site and ban serial-offenders (thank you everyone!)... the fact remain that Danbooru's archive has been a boon and one of the main sources of mass scraping for AI software companies, and continues to be so. even artists that pulled their images everywhere they had uploaded them, still have their images archived here, often without them even knowing.
by Adding GLAZE to the pictures archived here, DANBOORU's community now has a very real opportunity to have a -real- effect against AI companies and to help protect artists worldwide.
it may even act like a trap and actually screw them up and slow down the progress of their AI software too! this is because the more Glazed images are fed into the AI's database, the more the general output of the AI may become skewed and unreliable (aka: it will start to become weird for all output images, not just the images trying to imitate a specific artist that has their images glazed).
of course, the scraping and AI companies will eventually notice this, and stop scraping on Danbooru. but even that alone will still be a win (one less big source for them, and they got slowed down for a while).
what is everyone's toughts on this?
if you have more questions, you even ask Ben Zhao on twitter directly, he responds to almost all questions he gets, though he is pretty buisy with the recent release.
(PS: i have been using Danbooru for many years but created my account today to bring this proposition to the community)
Updated by nonamethanks