Nightshade: Make images unsuitable for model training
nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu
nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364338
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35224219
We’ve seen this arms race before and know who wins. It’s all snake oil imo
It's kinda funny in a way because effectively they're helping iron out ways in which these models "see" differently to humans. Every escalation will in the end just help make the models more robust...
That they are disclosing the tools rather than e.g. creating a network service makes this even easier.
It's all to benefit industry, whether the academics realize it or not.
In fact I would say the opposite is true. LLMs must protect against this as a security measure in unified models or things the LLM 'sees' may be faked.
If for example someone could trick you into seeing a $1 bill as a $10 it would be considered a huge failure on your part and it would be trained out of you if you wanted to remain employed.
I haven't and I don't know who wins. Who wins?
Adversarial examples aren't snake oil, if that's what you meant. There's a rich literature on both producing and bypassing them that has accumulated over the years, but while I haven't kept abreast with it, my recollection is that the bottom line is like that for online security: there's never a good reason not to make sure your system is up to date and protected from attacks, even if there exist attacks that can bypass any defense.
Where in this case attack and defense can both describe what artists want to do with their work.
I could imagine you could make one that was effective against multiple recognizers, but not in general.
I'd also guess it'd be easy to get rid of this vulnerability on the model side.
Don't confuse attempting to make AI misclassify an image as a security measure.
And yes, this is snake oil and the AI wins every time.
At the end of the day a human has to be able to interpret the image, and I'd add another constraint of not thinking it looks ugly. This puts a very hard floor on what a poisoner can put in an image before the human gets sick. In a rapid turn around GAN you hit that noise floor really quickly.
This is just grandstanding. Half the people from this lab will go on to work for AI companies.
175 years of history would disagree with you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity
Never mind that the more people try to corrupt a model, the more likely that future models will catch these corruption attempts as security and trust/safety issues to fix and work around.
The next Nightshade will eventually be viewed as malware to a model and then worked around, reconstructing around the attempt to break a model.
> You can crop it, resample it, compress it, smooth out pixels, or add noise, and the effects of the poison will remain. You can take screenshots, or even photos of an image displayed on a monitor, and the shade effects remain
if this becomes prevalent enough, you can create a lightweight classifier to remove "poisonous" images, then use some kind of neural-network(probably an autoencoder) to "fix" them. Training such networks won't be too difficult as you can create as many positive-negative samples as you want by using this tool.
It's also not obvious to me what happens with cartoon style art. Something that looks like white noise might be acceptable on an oil painting but not something with flat colors and clean lines.
Here's the paper in question:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.13828
My two cents is that in its current implementation the compromised images can be easily detected, and possibly even 'de-poisoned'.
The attack works by targeting an underrepresented concept (let's say 1% of images contain dogs, so 'dog' is a good concept to attack).
They poison the concept of 'dog' with the concept of 'cat' by blending (in latent space) an archetypical image of 'cat' (always the same) to every image containing a 'dog'.
This works during training, since every poisoned image of dog contains the same blended in image of a cat, so this false signal eventually builds up in the model, even if the poisoned sample count is low.
But note: this exploits the lack of data in a domain - this would not prevent the model from generating anime waifus or porn, because the training set of those is huge.
But how to detect poisoned images?
1. You take a non-poisoned labeler (these exist, because clean pre-SD datasets, and pre-poison diffusion models exist)
2. You ask your new model and the non-poisoned labeler to check your images. You find that the concept of 'dog' has been poisoned
3. You convert all your 'dog' images to latent space and take the average. Most likely all the non-poison details will average out, while the poison will accumulate.
4. You now have a 'signature' of the poison. You check each of your images in latent space against the correllation with the poison. If the correllation is high, the image is poisoned.
The poison is easily detectible for the same reason it works - it embeds a very strong signal that gets repeated across the training set.
To my knowledge, the era of scraping online sources of training data is over. The focus has been on reinforcement learning and acquiring access to offline data for at least a year or two. Synthetic data is generated, ranked and curated to produce the new training sets for improving models. There isn't even really any point to collecting human made images anymore because the rate of production of anything novel is so low. The future of data collection looks like Midjourney's platform where they integrate tools for providing feedback on generated images as well as tools for editing and composing generated images so that they can be improved manually. This closes the loop so the platform for generating images is now part of the model training pipeline.
I don't know what nightshade is supposed to do, but the fact that it doesn't affect the synthetic labeling of data at all leads me to believe image model trainers will have close to 0 consideration of what it does when training new models.