Venture Beat: Back in February 2023, a small team of researchers at the University of Chicago studying under computer science professor Ben Zhao released Glaze, a free software tool that uses machine learning to subtly alter the pixels of an artwork provided by a user, changing the way its style is perceived by any AI art generator models that scrape and train on said artworks.

Many artists flocked to the tool, with more than 740,000 downloads of it by summer of 2023, as well as the team’s hit follow-up open source program, Nightshade, which seeks to “poison” AI models training on artists’ works without consent.

Now, more than a year later, the University of Chicago Glaze Project team is back with a new version of their first offering: Glaze 2, which they say is faster for artists to use and provides more protection for them against newer AI models including Stable Diffusion XL, an open source text-to-image model that users can fine-tune to emulate a specific artist’s or artists style.

“Computation speed up is significant,” wrote Glaze Project team leader Ben Zhao, in an email to VentureBeat. “It generally means Glaze 2 runs nearly twice as fast as Glaze 1.1. Some older GPUs go from 4 mins to 2 mins per image. Others go from 50 seconds to 30 seconds per image.”

“In addition to Glaze2.0, we are working on a project extending Glaze-like protection to short videos and animations,” posted the Glaze Project team from their account on X.

Ben Zhao is a cybersecurity researcher for the C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute.

Read the full story, “Glaze 2: new version of anti-AI scraping tool for artists launches, video defense planned.”

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