Exciting busy day today. Visited my old friend, and one of the best tech journalists in the business, Kashmir Hill at NY Times. Took a photo of an amazing piece of history in NYT’s museum, the letter greenlighting the NYT crossword puzzle in 1941! Headed to give a keynote at ArtLaw conference now.

Today's Daily Cartoon for @newyorker.com by Kevin Maher and me.

Happy to announce that I (Ben) will be part of a AI and Creativity panel at San Diego Comic-con in July! We will discuss ongoing legal, legislative and technological efforts to protect artists. AI and the Creative Industries: Where We Stand, Sunday, 7/26 2026, 2:00PM - 3:00PM, Room: 32AB

Quick note for those who use both Nightshade and Glaze. If you run an image through Nightshade 1.1 and then run the result through Glaze 2.2, you get an error. This is a naming bug, easily fixed. You just rename the file after nightshade is done. Then glaze. Ty to btsensej.bsky.social for the fix.

Update #3: We have fixed the "TRUE" bug on Nightshade that's been tormenting us for quite some time. The fix also comes with updated drivers for new NVidia chips. The Windows version is ready and available: nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/downloads.html The MacOS version still needs a bit of time.

Update #2: Quicksilver, a detector for AI-generated music. Most folks today are not aware that AI-generated music (entire songs generated by AI models) are growing rapidly. Today, there are more AI-generated songs than human-created songs arriving each week on platforms like Spotify.

Happy Monday. Today we're making a few updates/announcements. First up: our nonprofit ETCH is alive on the web. etch-humanity.org ETCH: Ethical Technology and Computing for Humanity. ETCH is not another AI nonprofit. It is a nonprofit that explicitly prioritizes people over AI.

Not to be mysterious or whatever, but Monday will be a big news day for us. Multiple updates coming...

Girl, the solution to "the system is exploiting and replacing us" isn't "get a new system that can exploit and replace us". What are we even doing here? You can't fight for women if you're fighting for the technology that will run them out of the workplace.

Glaze 2.2 is out. It is an update for Windows users to support recent NVidia GPUs (including 50xx GPUs). Downloads at: glaze.cs.uchicago.edu Mac users do not need to update. We are also updating Nightshade to fix the True bug and also support new GPUs. That update is coming in the next few days.

Mega-Elon AI data centres in space? Absolutely loving @adambecker.bsky.social on why Musk hasn't entirely thought his 'genius idea' all the way through. The vacuum of space is an excellent insulator, filled with SSD-damaging radiation 😬 📻 Full Podcast: www.buzzsprout.com/2126417/epis...

News on Nightshade/Glaze. 1. We're testing updated Glaze for new NVidia GPUs 2. We've (finally) identified the source of the "True" bug in Nightshade. Good news: we can fix it. Less good news: it's in a error reporting routine, meaning there was an underlying error that triggered it. 3. more to come

Holy shit this is actually insane. This needs to be shot down, like what the heck are we doing here people.com/man-fell-in-...

🚨 It looks like the UK government is gearing up to upend copyright law in favour of AI companies, legalising the theft of their work. This is despite creatives' huge protests, and despite previous proposals being roundly rejected by the public. Please spread the word. 🧵 1/4

We're testing an updated release of Glaze for NVidia 50xx GPUs. If you have one of those chips, and want to help us test out the new binary, add a comment below. We just need a few volunteers to make sure the new binary works as planned. Thx.

I want to be an artist, but I don't want to learn how. I want to be a filmmaker, but I don't want to learn how. I want to be a musician, but I don't want to learn how. I want to be a writer, but I don't want to learn how. AI, for those who can't, don't, and won't.

Hey folks! There’s a cool sale at Schoolism right now for this Valentines weekend! Schoolism is an incredible collection of online art courses taught by industry professionals! Its a fantastic learning resource for beginners to professionals! Check out more here 👇 schoolism.com

Tech executives have finally amassed their ultimate, long dreamed-of power: to summarily fire anyone who speaks ill of their desire to have sex with robots

More reports of Gmail turning over email content to ICE are coming out now. techcrunch.com/2026/02/10/g...

Posts from @weratedogs.com continue not to disappoint.

It's my BIRTHDAY~! And in the age honored tradition of social media I humbly request a repost of my artwork~!

A rant. I (Ben) have multiple pending deadlines, but am very frustrated tonight. I need to rant about how awful paywalled magazines/news sites are. Why? Because their paywalls are trivial to break. Paywalls built using javascript actually download the full article, then put up a wall to block it.

Another favor to ask on a research project. We're wrapping up a large project on AI music. We need folks to participate in a short 10 min quiz to test your ability to distinguish between AI music & human music. Especially looking for help from musicians! uchicago.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

No worries. We get offers every day. If we wanted the $$$ we would have taken up one of those offers years ago.

For better or (mostly) for worse, 2025 is almost over. For all the human creatives out there, artists, writers, musicians, dancers, choreographers, and so many more, thank you for your perseverance and courage. Happy to announce: ETCH (Ethnical Technology and Computing for Humanity), a nonprofit.

@holyempresskira.bsky.social Another post from March 2025 trying to remind folks about what img2img is.

Steve isn’t here anymore, but he always posted this picture on Hanukkah so I thought we could carry on his tradition and remember him.

Karla said it so well. I (Ben) was thrilled to testify on the technical side, demonstrating with algorithms, real code and benchmarks on why data privacy is possible at scale. Sharing that room with Danny Lin, Jason George, and so so many talented and skilled creatives was a genuine honor.

Still so excited for everyone who showed up to this yesterday! It was stunning to see a sea of creatives overwhelm that tiny hearing. We had an overflow room of artists and the line for 30 second public commentary literally had to be cut off! You made a huge difference yesterday. Thank you!

Much needed updates. 1. Hemlock was presented at CCS in Oct. We are working on releasing a usable tool in coming weeks. 2. Our next paper is peer-reviewed & accepted by USENIX Security 2026. It is a Model Provenance tool that computes "feature fingerprints" from genAI image models.

SHOW UP TO TESTIFY MONDAY! (12/08/2025) Stanford Paul Brest Hall - 10am RSVP here: bit.ly/44lRMsX #CreateDontScrape #SupportHumanArtists #AB412 #March2Testify

How is AI *really* impacting jobs? Henley Chiu, the CTO of Revealera, a jobs data analysis firm, analyzed 180 million jobs listings in 2024 and 2025, in an effort to find out. Chiu found an: -8% drop in all jobs postings -~30% drop in art, photography, writing jobs -22% drop in journalism jobs

We don’t use generative AI at Strange Scaffold and I can confirm that a *lot* of other studios are not—whether indie or AAA. Get outta here with this normalization bullshit.

My friend @shofcoker.bsky.social and his team just launched a kickstarter for their indie animated film, Crocodile Dance—please pledge or share. This needs to get made!

We rarely post news stories, but this is a significant and impactful story from @alexreisner.bsky.social @ the atlantic, detailing just how Common Crawl is scraping the internet for AI companies and accepting takedown requests but doing nothing: www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

Heather's new TED talk on AI and human identity, is now online. www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdJZ...

“I think they are a profoundly antisocial technology that should be rejected in every way possible,” said Gilliard. “Their very existence is toxic to the social fabric.” @hypervisible.blacksky.app www.theverge.com/tech/807834/...

There's been endless talk about an AI bubble, but less about exactly how, why, and how much it's a bubble. So I turned to the framework put forward by scholars Brent Goldfarb and David A. Kirsch, authors of "Bubbles and Crashes," for assessing tech bubbles. Spoiler: On a scale of 1 to 8, AI is an 8

This week I'll be presenting at Lightbox Expo in GenAI/Glaze panel. Come hear about latest tools and ways to protect your work against genAI, recent court case outcomes, and ongoing AI legislation efforts. I also will bring ~500 invites for webglaze for any panel attendees. Friday 2:30PM Ballroom G

So for-profit AI companies have trained on the world's largest collaborative volunteer project and a precious free resource, to make money for their for-profit enterprises. They have crushed traffic to the volunteer project, starving it of donors and volunteers www.404media.co/wikipedia-sa...

after millions of views and shares of my Portland Frog art. (thank you all🙏🏾) I got requests to highlight priests, and chickens, and Chicagoans, and T-Rexes, and more… all of us who refuse to bend the knee. so this is for US. 𝚂𝚝𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚃𝚊𝚕𝚕. 𝚆𝚎 𝚆𝚒𝚕𝚕 𝚆𝚒𝚗.

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

@samdoesarts.bsky.social has made a video on the forced AI up-scaling that Youtube does on people's shorts and it (not so surprisingly) doesn't translate well when it comes to people's art. #artists #artsky

It’s my birthday! 🎉 May I be so bold as to ask to share my art? Below I’m going to drop some links (ko-fi tip jar, portrait commissions, contact for freelance) as all kinds of support are incredibly appreciated in these trying times! 💖

“Authors have until the end of August to opt out of the licensing agreement. If they do not, their work will be used to help train AI models.”

Folks often ask if we can do anything to protect authors and writers. I have been indeed working on it, and this is recent news on our case. Bartz vs Anthropic is now the first case certified as class action. The ramifications are significant. See below. chatgptiseatingtheworld.com/2025/07/17/a...

Someone just offered to license our entire back catalog of issues for "AI" training. No way in hell. Not gonna happen. No means no. Don't come back. Don't even look this way. Seriously. We don't want you here.

Update thread #3: Lightbox and Comic-con Thanks to a pretty cool friend connected to the art world, I'm going to be attending San Diego comic-con this year. First time in more than a decade. I'll also be participating on a SDCC panel (Owned: Comics Copyright & the Public Domain, Friday 1pm, Rm 11)

Update thread #2. Hemlock One thing we worked on is a different tool to complement Nightshade. We discovered a new attack on diffusion models that is more generalizable than Nightshade. It targets an entirely different part of AI training pipeline, basically making AI models poison themselves.