New data poisoning tool would punish AI for scraping art without permission

Called “Nightshade,” after the family of plants, some of which are understood for their harmful berries, the tool modifies images in such a way that their addition contaminates the datasets used to train AI with inaccurate info. According to a report from MITs Technology Review, Nightshade changes the pixels of a digital image in order to deceive an AI system into misinterpreting it. Using the above example, if a user asked for an image of a “feline” from the tainted AI, they might rather get a dog labelled as a feline or an amalgamation of all the “cats” in the AIs training set, including those that are really images of pet dogs that have actually been modified by the Nightshade tool.