AI TraceTrace Foundation, Inc.
OtherVerified

Reviewed and published by trentmaziarz, April 22, 2026. Discovered and drafted by our automated research pipeline.

The 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.

Details

Glaze works by using style-transfer algorithms to identify the specific pixel features that define an artist's style, then computing minimal perturbations to those features that are imperceptible to the human eye but appear as a dramatically different style to AI models. The tool runs locally on the artist's computer (Windows and Mac), processes images one at a time, and produces a 'cloaked' image file the artist can post publicly. It was first released in March 2023 and has been downloaded more than 8.5 million times globally as of the project's most recent disclosure.

Products affected

Glaze (desktop app)

Sources & Evidence

Company Disclosure

Company DisclosureVerified
About The Glaze Project - The University of Chicago
The Glaze Project, University of Chicago·Jan 2024
https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/aboutus.html
Company DisclosureVerified
Glaze - What is Glaze
The Glaze Project, University of Chicago·Jun 2023
https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/what-is-glaze.html

Academic Paper

Academic Paper
Glaze: Protecting Artists from Style Mimicry by Text-to-Image Models
USENIX Security Symposium 2023·Aug 2023
https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity23/presentation/shan

News Article

News Article
Glaze protects art from prying AIs
TechCrunch·Mar 2023
https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/17/glaze-generative-ai-art-style-mimicry-protection/
News Article
UChicago Scientists Develop New Tool to Protect Artists from AI Mimicry
University of Chicago Department of Computer Science·Feb 2023
https://cs.uchicago.edu/news/uchicago-scientists-develop-new-tool-to-protect-artists-from-ai-mimicry/

Cite this record

Trace Foundation. (2026). Glaze: The 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 (data as of 2026-04-22) [Data set record]. AI Trace. https://www.aitrace.org/r/practice/af23ae47-82f8-4f78-b662-09c78afab7ad. Accessed September 10, 2026.

Stable link
https://www.aitrace.org/r/practice/af23ae47-82f8-4f78-b662-09c78afab7ad
Data as of
April 22, 2026
Last verified
April 22, 2026

How to cite AI Trace

Other practices by Glaze

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.OtherThe 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.

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