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AI poisoning tool Nightshade received 250,000 downloads in 5 days: ‘beyond anything we imagined’

It's a strong start for the free tool, and shows a robust appetite among some artists to protect their work from being used to train AI.

“Nightshade hit 250K downloads in 5 days since release,” wrote the leader of the project, Ben Zhao, a professor of computer science, in an email to VentureBeat, later adding, “I expected it to be extremely high enthusiasm. Nightshade seeks to “poison” generative AI image models by altering artworks posted to the web, or “shading” them on a pixel level, so that they appear to a machine learning algorithm to contain entirely different content — a purse instead of a cow, let’s say. “We warned people that we have not done full tests to understand how it works together with Glaze and that folks should wait before releasing any images with only Nightshade,” Zhao explained.

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