The Glaze Project (including Glaze, Nightshade, WebGlaze and others) is a research effort that develops technical tools with the explicit goal of protecting human creatives against invasive uses of generative artificial intelligence or GenAI. Our team is composed of computer science professors and PhD students from the University of Chicago. We perform research studies and develop tools that artists can use to disrupt unauthorized AI training on their work product. Ultimately, our goal is to ensure the continued vitality of human artists, and to restore balance and ensure a healthy coexistence between AI and human creatives, where the human creatives retain agency and control over their work products and their use. Since 2022, our team has released multiple tools, including Glaze, a tool to disrupt art style mimicry, Nightshade, a tool to disincentivize training without consent on scraped images, and WebGlaze, a free web service to make Glaze accessible to artists with limited computing resources. All of our tools are free to use for artists, and will never be used to generate profit. All our expenses for research and advocacy are covered by research grants and donations (Thank you National Science Foundation, DARPA, Amazon AWS and C3.ai).

Our Values and Our Mission. Art is inspired by and an expression of our experiences, emotions, pain and trauma. It connects us and defines much of what it means to be human. We believe that human creativity is unique and ever evolving, and today's generative AI systems can only produce poor approximations of the human creative works they are trained on. Our goal is to help ensure that human creativity continues to thrive, by providing the technological tools that enables all human creatives (artists, musicians, authors, journalists, voice actors, dancers, choreographers ...) to protect their artistic creations from unwanted AI training and AI mimicry.

Perhaps the article that provides the most comprehensive coverage of our work is this profile of our lab by MIT Technology Review's Melissa Heikkilä.

To date, artists across the globe have downloaded Glaze more than 5 million times since March 2023, and Nightshade more than 2 million times since January 2024. Our projects have been covered by major newspapers and news networks on every continent, from the Americas to EU, from Asia to South Africa. We have given talks to artist groups around the world, advocated for ethical AI with legislators in the US and EU, and are actively engaged with the US Copyright Office, the FTC, and multiple other federal agencies.

Out of our lab's recent peer reviewed publications, those most highly related to the Glaze project include:

We have received a number of awards and recognitions for our work: