So Glaze, Nightshade and their siblings are dead.

For those of you who go "🤔 What are those?" - they're tools meant to make training AI on photos or artworks difficult or produce incorrect results.

I saw a paper that works around them by using noise injection + latent upscaling to lessen the artifacts enough so that finetuning a Image Generation AI model is feasible, and now there is this new paper that thoroughly rips out the artifacts entirely.

Link to a summary: https://www.technologyreview.com/20.....m-digital-art/

Link to the actual paper: https://www.usenix.org/conference/u.....ation/foerster (PDF link is at the bottom)

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Algorithmic protection against AI scraping and abuse is a cat and mouse game that's not gonna work. You can't retroactively pull your old artworks from the web and reupload them with fresh protection. Too late. Copies exist now. I sure as hell save every nice artwork I come across, often the original disappears after some years.

That leaves regular, oldschool, bespoke, design-based watermarking.

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So this is the question then, and something you can help with:

- Have you spotted artworks that have a watermark/logo in them that is decent in size, covering the center portion of the image, but not annoying?
Drop a link to an example in a comment if you know such a thing.

- Have you spotted an artwork where the watermark/logo just ruins everything? I'd also like a link to an example for that if you can find something. Optional though, I can see how this might not be something you want to point at and look rude in the process. xD I'm happy with just positive examples.


I'm not looking for anyone to bash my artist colleagues for censoring their works, or using watermarks that are crap.
I am trying to get an idea of where the limit is - what size or shape or kind of watermarking annoys y'all and ruins the viewing experience. And which kind is generally seen as okay and a fair trade-off because it doesn't ruin the fap enjoyment of the artworks.

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Anyone with enough time and skill can either inpaint watermarks away in an automated fashion, or re-paint the affected areas by hand if they got art skills.
That takes actual effort though and most people who can do that don't need to have AI generate art for them. They can paint their own works.

Just stuffing my logo and link into a corner doesn't work - because that is more meant as an information to the viewer where to find more of my works, not as a hindrance to looking at things.

But. If I can make life for the rest of people/companies extremely miserable by having a large but not annoying watermark on my artwork posts, I'd like to do so. Once I understand what's considered ok!



Thoughts?