The end of optimized images on my websites
From now on, images posted by me on reinderdijkhuis.com and associated social media will be a little worse-looking and a lot larger in file size. This is the result of measures I’m taking to protect my art against use by LLM companies like OpenAI.
For as long as I’ve published webcomics, I have proudly optimized my images using technology like pngout for pngs, or simply moving the compression slider in my image creation software for jpegs. Even as broadband became more widely used, I kept doing this, in the hope of shaving a few milliseconds off the load time, but also because I spent some time in rural Tennessee where people depended on slow, unreliable satellite bandwidth. And in the age of smartphones, as web pages continued to balloon in size, I heeded the words of an activist I knew on Mastodon, who argued that this file bloat amounted to a wealth transfer from ordinary web users to the phone and broadband companies, so even in the 2020s, I kept a close eye on file sizes. Not any more. I still like it when the files I serve are compact and load fast, but I will no longer post un-Glazed images anywhere. And some time in the future, I will also start protecting my images with Nightshade. This includes reposts of older work, and it includes my own website, which has a robots.txt directive excluding scrapers that collect content to use as training data for AI models.
Glaze is software that is used to disguise the style of 2D images in a way that is mostly invisible to the human eye but fools Large Language Models. Nightshade does the same but also disguises the subject of the image. I have been using Glaze on my images for a few weeks; the only thing that stops me from using Nightshade now is that I still work on Intel Macs, which don’t have the GPU power to run it. Glaze is available as a web application; Nightshade isn’t, but will soon be.
Neither of these systems are perfect, far from it. First off, and most pertinently for this post, the changes to the images introduced by Glaze are actually visible as artifacts: little ‘swimmers’ in the image, like floaties in your eyes. Webglaze also returns images with minimal compression, so the files are bigger; a 300 Kb webcomic page comes back as 1.1 Mb. Re-compressing the image is possible, but it’s an extra step that may make the protection less effective as it introduces a new set of artifacts. The cost of these bigger, slower images will be born by you; I will see no direct financial benefit from you paying it, because it all goes to whoever supplies you with bandwidth. I am very sorry, but that’s how it is.
Glaze can also only protect still 2D images, so videos or even gifs are still unprotected as are 3D files and images with layers. That’s very limited.
Glaze uses the same technology as the AI text and image generators, and this means it also has a larger environmental impact than simply not using it. This is very unfortunate and may impact future choices about what images I post at all, just as the whole non-consensual scraping issue may impact those choices. But I have to fight with the weapons I have, not the ones I wish I had.
Depending on WebGlaze also puts a cap on the number of images I can share over a given period: no more than 10 per day unless I save them up, or 40 per week. This limit should not be unsurmountable, and if it turns out to be, I will, again, become more selective about what images I share.
In addition, neither Glaze nor Nightshade are open source, so what they actually do is a bit ‘mystery meat’. And of course, with all that, they are merely better than nothing. Not absolute protection, because eventually the defenses they offer will be defeated and will need to be upgraded. It’s an arms race.
I fully expect that the next countermeasure by platforms that also own or partner with AI companies (which is to say, all of them) will not be technological; it will be to simply forbid the posting of Glazed or Nightshaded material in their TOS. In that case, expect the posting of images by me outside of my personal website to drop off a cliff.
In that case, we all lose. How much we lose is a matter of personal, subjective opinion, but that there is some loss, of my creative energy and purpose, to your access to human-made art you may enjoy, seems beyond doubt.
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