Glaze Software User Guide
Welcome to Glaze! This user guide will walk you through the steps to protect your artwork with Glaze. This is a living document, and we will continuously add content to the guide as we hear back from artists and their experiences.
First, if you haven’t already, please read more about Glaze and its risks and limitations before using the tool on your artwork. Second, we are always working to improve Glaze. Please be patient as we fix issues and improve the tool over time. If you run into issues, you can file a bug report.
Step by Step Guide
The first time you install Glaze, it will need to download a number of machine learning libraries and pretrained models. This might take some time, particularly if you are outside the USA. Note that these are one time downloads, and do not need to be fetched again if you update the Glaze app. Once Glaze is fully installed, follow these instructions below:
Please run Glaze as the last step before you post your artwork online. If you do any image resizing, format conversion, or watermarking, please do so before you run Glaze. This will maximize the protection effect.
Instructions on running Glaze on Windows GPU: To run Glaze on GPU, your computer must have one of the NVidia GPUs listed on this list. Please note that PyTorch ML libraries has a floating point arithmetic bug with NVidia GTX 1660/1650/1550 GPUs. If you have one of them, Glaze will likely produce all black images or something equally strange as output. The GPU must have more than 3.6G of GPU memory. You can find your GPU information following this Guide. If you have one of these compatible GPUs, please install the NVidia CUDA Toolkit from the Nvidia official website. Once installed, Glaze should run automatically on your GPU. Sorry for the hassle. The Glazing process requires significant GPU memory to run. And since we do not have the development time to build our own integrated GPU drivers, we have to rely on official NVidia drivers that you install separately.
Step 1: Select your artwork. You can input a single image by dragging it into the image placeholder or selecting multiple images using the "Select..." button.
Step 2: Select Glaze parameters.
Intensity: Specify the intensity of "the style cloak" applied to your artwork. Higher intensity leads to stronger protection, but also generally correlates with more visible changes to your artwork. The more Glaze changes your artwork with perturbations, the harder it will be for AI models to recognize your original artistic style, making it that much harder to mimic. The Glaze app will analyze the first image you input, and estimate the lowest intensity that gives sufficient protection for your specific style. You can of course choose medium or high (both are higher than default), but they will produce more visible artifacts than default.
Render quality: This represents the compute time spent searching for the optimal style cloak given your intensity level. Longer render quality leads to better performance but longer compute time. The highest render quality takes around 60 mins per image on a personal laptop. This will highly depend on the specs of your laptop. GPUs are not required but if present, they will greatly reduce the processing time.
Step 3: Preview or Run. Once you upload the image(s) and select your desired settings, you can "Preview" the Glazed result. Preview allows you to see the estimated final image(s) with the Glaze changes, so you can make adjustments to the Intensity level if needed, before rendering the final image(s). Note that the preview result might not be representative of the final result. Once you are satisfied with the Intensity level, you can click Run, which will Glaze the image(s). The resulting image(s) will be saved in your "output directory" with the same file name.
Note: Glaze protection varies with different styles of art. Some artistic styles (e.g., character design, animated art), are more vulnerable to protection removal due to the “smoother surfaces” of the style. As a result, we encourage you to use an Intensity level of "Low" or higher. After the image is modified, Glaze checks the effectiveness of the result, and warns you if it fails to offer enough protection.
Issues and feedback: Please fill out our feedback form to let us know about your experience using Glaze. Please fill out our bug report with any issues.
FAQs on Running Glaze
Glaze said it encountered errors on my images, how should I fix it? You can check the details of the errors in error.txt in your output folder. The most common error is Glaze fails to offer strong enough protection to some of your artwork. When this happens, you can try to re-run Glaze on those artwork. If the error persists, you should consider increasing the Intensity level and/or render quality before re-run Glaze on those artwork. As we discussed above, some type of artwork will be harder to protect than others.
Why does the same intensity level look different across art pieces? The same intensity level (pixel change magnitude) may have different noticeability on different types of artwork. For example, the change is more noticeable on smooth or darker surfaces.
How do I know the protection is sufficient/effective? It is challenging to estimate the success of the protection because it would require someone to build a customized AI model mimicking your artwork. We currently do not plan to release such an evaluation tool given that it can easily be misused for malicious purposes.
How much computer resources is Glaze using? Glaze uses around 5 Gb of memory and a substantial amount of CPU computing. We are working on reducing these numbers.
What should I do if Glaze warns insufficient computer memory? If you computer has less than 9Gb of memory, you can still run Glaze but it may take a much longer time to render. You can speed it up by closing any other applications that use a lot of memory. If your computer has less than 5Gb of memory, we do not recommend you to run Glaze currently. We are working on reducing Glaze's memory usage.
Does Glaze generate the same result each time given the same original art? No, Glaze will generate slightly different results given the same original art and settings.
Can I glaze my art twice for better security? No, it could actually hurt the protection. Increasing the Intensity level and/or render quality is currently the only way to improve protection strength.
Will Glaze support other operating systems (Linux, iOS, Android)? Currently, we do not plan to support platforms other than Windows and MacOS. You are welcome to install Windows VM on Linux to run Glaze.
How do I uninstall Glaze? We will build an uninstaller in the future.
For now, you can find the downloaded resources in the hidden ".glaze"
folder on your system (see below).
If you would like to remove and redownload just the resources,
delete the ".glaze" folder and restart Glaze app. Resources will redownload automatically.
If you would like to remove the full Glaze app and it's resources,
delete the Glaze application and the entire ".glaze" folder.
Disclosure: you will be downloading some of the resources from HuggingFace (a common platform to host resources) and we use checksums to make sure the files are authentic and have not been tampered with. However, if you would like to download from the University of Chicago server (on a slower connection), you can email us for instructions.
