ArtShield for Krita

Develop Plugins Development
, ,
1

Hello!

I searched for a method, to protect the images created with Krita from AI-scrapping. I came across ArtShield. It is opensource and written in python, so I was hoping, someone well-versed in plugin-development for Krita, would be interested. :grimacing:

The idea is, to mark your image with a watermark, which is used from AI-image-generators. AI-image-generators scrapping the web, exclude images, which have these watermarks, to not learn from itself or other image-generators.

The sourcecode can be found here.
What do you think? Any volunteers? :stuck_out_tongue:

4 Likes
2

So from what I read on their page all it does is to put the watermark on images that stable diffusion does to prevent itself from learning on already AI generated stuff (generated by itself). This doesnā€™t really prevent anyone (else) to use your artworks and ironically AI detection tools that get implemented by website to detect fraud will then also think your legit human made art is generated by AI.

6 Likes
3

Wellā€¦ there are always 2 sides of a coin.
The good thing is, your images will not be taken to learn from, because of the watermark. If they are taken, you can use the watermark to find them and can let the images be excluded from the dataset.

The bad thing is, because of the watermark, it looks for machines like an AI generated image, but I would take that as a compromise.

4

And it only works for Stable Diffusion, the other models are not affected, if I see that right.

Michelist

5

Yes, but I think image generator does not learn from an other ai generator :thinking:

6

I looked into the code (and they write it on their website too)

The watermark is basically the UTF-8 letters ā€œSDV2ā€ as bits.

(I guess that stands for Stable Diffusion Version 2)

And thatā€™s it, the watermark is the same for all images so you canā€™t actually identify a specific artwork with the watermark alone. You can change the string but then it wonā€™t be recognized by Stable Diffusion anymore and the watermark only is for Stable Diffusion not any other tool which can simply ignore it, if they even check it at all (just like robots.txt is generally ignored although fulfilling a similar role).

Iā€™ve already seen legit artists being accused of using AI and being bullied into submission just because tools that claim to be able to tell the difference are really bad at it. Intentionally marking it as such, to me it feels like cutting your feet off to prevent them from getting dirty.

Also with the copyright situation about AI generated images still being inconclusive in many countries the watermark marks your image as fair game to use for whatever people like since AI images have no copyright protection and you make it look like it is one.

1 Like
7

Ok.

Using ArtShield as protection from AI is not reasonable.

But what about using the artists credentials to add a watermark onto your images, though I donā€™t know what happens if you reexport to another format :thinking:

8

You can already do this in Krita and gmic with the fourier transform filter, if I remember correctly. The thing is, same with the tool you linked, what does that prove? Everyone can take any image and put their watermark on it. And the problem with resizing and converting files is an issue in ArtShield as well, thatā€™s why they create additional copies of the file in different dimensions and watermark them as well, because itā€™s likely that they donā€™t survive a conversion, resizing or jpg compression.

Thereā€™s really no way to solve a social issue with tech alone.

2 Likes