OtherVerified
Reviewed and published by trentmaziarz, April 22, 2026. Discovered and drafted by our automated research pipeline.
The Glaze Project offers artists a free, downloadable tool called Glaze that uses machine learning to add imperceptible pixel-level changes to artwork, causing AI image models to misidentify the artist's style and preventing accurate style mimicry. Glaze was first released in March 2023 and has been downloaded more than 8.5 million times globally.
Details
Glaze takes an artist's digital image as input and, using machine learning style-transfer algorithms, computes minimal pixel perturbations that make the image appear to AI models as a dramatically different art style while remaining visually unchanged to human viewers. For example, a charcoal realism portrait may appear to an AI model as abstract art in the style of Jackson Pollock. A browser-based version called WebGlaze was deployed in August 2023, running on AWS cloud GPU servers to serve artists without powerful computers; WebGlaze is invite-only and available to any human artist who does not use generative AI tools.
Products affected
GlazeWebGlaze
Sources & Evidence
Company Disclosure
News Article
Cite this record
Trace Foundation. (2026). Nightshade: The Glaze Project offers artists a free, downloadable tool called Glaze that uses machine learning to add imperceptible pixel-level changes to artwork, causing AI image models to misidentify the artist's style and preventing accurate style mimicry. Glaze was first released in March 2023 and has been downloaded more than 8.5 million times globally (data as of 2026-04-22) [Data set record]. AI Trace. https://www.aitrace.org/r/practice/dd16e36d-7534-4494-817f-0555e540a30e. Accessed October 3, 2026.
- Stable link
- https://www.aitrace.org/r/practice/dd16e36d-7534-4494-817f-0555e540a30e
- Data as of
- April 22, 2026
- Last verified
- April 22, 2026
Other practices by Nightshade
Data AnalysisThe Glaze Project deployed a research study that uses AI-based classifiers to analyze whether images were created by a human artist or generated by an AI model, publishing findings on the accuracy of both automated detectors and human reviewers. This work was published in October 2024.OtherNightshade offers artists a free, downloadable tool that uses machine learning to alter pixels in artwork so that any AI model trained on those images learns incorrect visual associations — for example, interpreting a dog as a cat. The tool was first released on January 18, 2024, and has been downloaded more than 2.5 million times globally.
Have evidence about Nightshade's AI practices? Submit a report.
Report a Sighting →