OtherVerified
Reviewed and published by trentmaziarz, April 22, 2026. Discovered and drafted by our automated research pipeline.
The Glaze Project offers a free downloadable tool called Nightshade that allows artists to apply invisible pixel-level changes to their images before posting online, causing AI image-generation models that train on those images to learn incorrect associations between objects and concepts. It was publicly released in January 2024 and has been downloaded more than 2.5 million times.
Details
Where Glaze is defensive (preventing style mimicry of a specific artist), Nightshade is offensive: it embeds hidden pixel distortions that cause AI models to associate the wrong concepts with images — for example, training data showing dogs may register as cats to the model. The Glaze Project has described this as a 'data poisoning' approach intended to raise the cost to AI companies of scraping artists' work without consent. Nightshade was developed at the University of Chicago SAND Lab and peer-reviewed at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in May 2024. The team has stated they plan to integrate Nightshade as an optional feature within Glaze.
Products affected
Nightshade (desktop app)
Sources & Evidence
News Article
Cite this record
Trace Foundation. (2026). Glaze: The Glaze Project offers a free downloadable tool called Nightshade that allows artists to apply invisible pixel-level changes to their images before posting online, causing AI image-generation models that train on those images to learn incorrect associations between objects and concepts. It was publicly released in January 2024 and has been downloaded more than 2.5 million times (data as of 2026-04-22) [Data set record]. AI Trace. https://www.aitrace.org/r/practice/33f01c5f-522e-431f-9e15-91078a866125. Accessed September 11, 2026.
- Stable link
- https://www.aitrace.org/r/practice/33f01c5f-522e-431f-9e15-91078a866125
- Data as of
- April 22, 2026
- Last verified
- April 22, 2026
Other practices by Glaze
OtherThe Glaze Project offers a free downloadable app called Glaze that uses machine learning to apply invisible pixel-level changes to artworks, causing AI image-generation models to misread an artist's style and fail to mimic it accurately. Artists apply Glaze to their images before posting them online, as a defensive measure against unauthorized style copying by systems like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion.OtherThe Glaze Project deployed WebGlaze in August 2023, a free invite-only web service that lets artists apply the same style-cloaking protection as the desktop Glaze app directly from a phone, tablet, or browser, without needing a powerful personal computer. The Glaze team runs the processing on GPU servers at the University of Chicago.
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