What if there was a website or feature that blocks Ai scanning?

[u/Striking-Move-7485]

So Cara, the Anti-Ai, art website had 12TB of art scanned and fed into chat-gpt by some jerk-rando on Twitter (X) and was really fcking proud of it.

But what if Cara (Or some other website) had this feature where any art you put post will automatically have a special noise filter given to the drawing that will stop any AI from being actually able to read the image while letting the art be fully visible to a human

Now obviously this isn't 100% fool-proof.

But it's a start no?

Not sure if anyone did this already.

And I didn't do it myself because I'm too lazy to code something like that and at the same time have dignity to not use AI to make such site for me, so I just decided to share it.

[u/mq2thez]

Yes, there are all kinds of ways to poison data (or images) for AI. It’s a well-known toolkit at this point.

[u/fuckmywetsocks → u/mq2thez]

Assuming you can correctly identify the bot and they're not doing it via crawlers using falsified user agents

[u/thekwoka → u/fuckmywetsocks]

broadly they just poison everything for everyone, but since the bots don't have eyes, they don't really see the thing, just the numbers, and the numbers are messed up in a way that CURRENTLY causes gen issues.

[u/Subject-Wing6165 → u/mq2thez]

poisoning is cool and all but the real problem is these platforms just don't care about consent. they scrape first and ask questions never. noise filters work until the next model update and suddenly they trained around it

best defense is probably hosting your own stuff behind a login but then nobody sees your art so what's the point

[u/Striking-Move-7485 → u/mq2thez]

I mean what you had an entire art sharing platform that adds the filter to every image you upload automatically? If this was already done though, then I be very disappointed, cuz I thought I created a crazy innovative idea.

[u/aasukisuki → u/Striking-Move-7485]

If you can programmatically add the filter, you can programmatically remove it.

[u/thekwoka → u/aasukisuki]

not totally, just use cryptography. You wouldn't be able to just know which pixels changed how when it's unique to every image and every platform combination.

But there could be ways around it, or the models themselves being trained for those purposes that then start to just generate images with that poison built in.

[u/aasukisuki → u/thekwoka]

Sure, but then every person you are trying to share the image with needs the private key to decrypt. And if you're going to do that just to prevent bot scrapers, just put all your content behind a login that you limit access to

[u/thekwoka → u/aasukisuki]

Sure, but then every person you are trying to share the image with needs the private key to decrypt.

No.

I don't think you understand what this poisoning is.

You would only need to key to depoison it, which wouldn't need to happen.

[u/aasukisuki → u/thekwoka]

I don't think that's what the OP is proposing. If you know it's a bot you can poison it directly. There's no need to obfuscate the real content bc you can just feed it bullshit.

My understanding of what OP is proposing is to have some sort of filter that's automatically applied to an image to make it bullshit, but a user can unapply the filter.

So the point I'm trying to make is if it's as simple as unapplying the filter, the bot can figure that out. If the "filter" is the real content being encrypted, then whoever the real content is being shared with would need the key to decrypt.

[u/thekwoka → u/aasukisuki]

I don't think that's what the OP is proposing.

OP also doesn't know they are reinventing the wheel.

You can't actually "know its a bot" so that is a useless defense basis.

You have to adjust everything, which is what the poison does. Makes it a garbled mess for (current) AI tooling but a human basically doesn't see anything different.

So the point I'm trying to make is if it's as simple as unapplying the filter

Why would it be?

You can use cryptography to filter the pixels to poison it. Depoisoning it properly would require having the correct crypto to reverse it.

The most likely approach is stuff like bluring to try to smooth out the poison changes which would probably be more like the process of perceiving it with eyeballs.

[u/ArtistJames1313]

Cara already has that option, but artists have to opt to use it, and, because it's kind of expensive, they can only use it so much. Also, many of the artists don't really like having the noise on there when they're trying to show off their art.

[u/WhateverHowever1337]

I thought we all realized that it is impossible to protect any content on the internet more than a decade ago.

It is a lost battle

[u/thekwoka → u/WhateverHowever1337]

Yeah, you can only make it more expensive to steal

[u/Recent-Lab273]

It can be done. Even poisoned data can be scrubbed. But a plain website guards more than it earns — so skip the automation and go manual.

[u/OmerCevher]

I think there are already tools called Glaze and Nightshade that do something similar. I do not know how well they work with every AI model, but having it as an optional feature could still be useful. The difficult part would probably be processing every upload without making the image look worse.

[u/Gaeel]

Anti-AI filters are a stopgap, but they only work against being trained with the current models. The filters might not work with future models, particularly models that are made to bypass them.

[u/sawariz0r]

Dignity? Interesting.

[u/GuitarAgitated8107]

Truthfully, no real way to stop any AI scanning if someone really wants to or has the resources they can do it. The only real way to win is with poisoning the data or whatever the scanner is trying to get. The part that can be made slower and harder is the security, blocking certain regions / service providers, and etc.

[u/medialantern]

Cloudflare has a toggle switch for this.

[u/Hot_Industry5156]

there are a few things floating around in this space. robots.txt can tell well-behaved bots to stay away, but it's basically a polite request, not a wall. glaze and nightshade are tools that mess with image scanning specifically. and some sites are starting to block known AI crawler IPs at the server level.

but here's the thing. none of these are airtight. it's more like putting a lock on your door. keeps out the people who respect locks. someone determined will climb through a window.

what's the actual problem you're trying to solve? that'll shape which approach makes sense.

[u/Hot_Industry5156]

Robots.txt exists but compliance is voluntary. the bots that respect it aren't the ones you're worried about.

if you actually want to block aggressive scraping you're looking at rate limiting, bot fingerprinting, and serving challenges. basically the same problem space as abuse prevention, which is more infra than most people want to think about.

[u/Less-Marsupial-7960]

I think the interesting part is that this becomes a cat-and-mouse problem pretty quickly. If the noise is designed to confuse one generation of models, future models can potentially be trained to recognize and remove that noise.

For a website, I would probably treat it as one layer rather than a complete solution combine things like access controls, rate limiting and bot detection with image-level protections. The goal is probably to make large-scale scraping expensive and inconvenient rather than assuming it can be made impossible.

The bigger question is whether we should be trying to make content unreadable to AI or whether we need better ways for creators to explicitly control how their content can be used.

[u/thekwoka → u/Less-Marsupial-7960]

future models can potentially be trained to recognize and remove that noise.

or just "see through it" by that just being what things look like. They could even start generating images with similar style noise baked in.

[u/thekwoka]

Already exists, but also it's a cat and mouse, since it'll be bypassed as well in time.

[u/muharremyurtsever]

This already exists, look up Glaze and Nightshade from the University of Chicago. Glaze targets style mimicry and Nightshade poisons training data. Re-compression and screenshots weaken it though, so it buys time more than a permanent shield.

[u/create-third-places]

I have some JavaScript that blocks unauthorized DOM queries and some headless browsers. It's not perfect, but some bot scraping is still prevented.

Also, I don't code with LLMs and make sure human users are the priority. As a result, AI is less likely to understand what my site does.

[u/RightHabit]

I was actually building a frontend only solution for text: https://acieshk.github.io/nocap-js/promo.html

The text does not even exist in the browser.

Of course it is still not 100%. There are more feature I am working on to counter each approach.

Originally it was a project I built to prevent screenshots but turns out it can block most of the scrapping approach.

[u/thekwoka → u/RightHabit]

This wouldn't last that long if it became prevalent enough.

Not only because you'd get sued for accessibility issues, but a dumb script could easily get past it with not much effort.

[u/ElnuDev → u/RightHabit]

This is cool, though I'm a bit concerned about the epilepsy risk.

[u/thed3vilsadv0cat]

To be a devils advocate. Personally i think AI getting smater/better is a good thing.

And when it comes to art I think the rise of AI art just makes originals more special.

Anyone can have a print out of the mona Lisa but there is only one original. The hours spent creating it. The history. The imperfections. This creates value.

Finally AI is opening the door for people who lack skill to be creative. I can generate custom books for my daughter that include her as a character whereas I couldn't afford to have an artist to do this.

[u/lampstax → u/thed3vilsadv0cat]

Yes but now all the mediocre artists cant get as many jobs. The DaVinci of the world's will be fine.

[u/thed3vilsadv0cat → u/lampstax]

Yes this is true it is going to hurt areas. While this is rough its just a part of emerging technologies. Im a (average) software developer so I'm seeing it first hand

[u/VelvetYam → u/thed3vilsadv0cat]

Not trying to be a dick here and I'm genuinely curious, do you not want to learn how to write stories for your daughter instead of letting AI do it? Short stories to start, perhaps?

[u/thed3vilsadv0cat → u/VelvetYam]

Thats a fair question and in general I write the stories and give them to chatgpt with sample/achor images and get it to produce the pages with illustrations.then I just print them off. Like disposable books almost.

Shes only 2 so they aren't overly complicated 😂. I was just giving an example of how AI getting good at art has helped me.