How can an artist avoid their work being weaponized?

HN might not be the best place to ask, though. There's a heavy bias in favor of open-source tech, which explicitly allows any use case (which implies allowing military uses).

Also there's frequently a lot of comments which sing praises to SQLite, which was created literally for military purposes (according to Wikipedia, at least, so take that with a grain of salt).

What I mean with all this is, even if those examples are not related to art, there seems to be a general bias to the opposite of what you're asking for.

One tool is called nightshade:

https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/index.html

There is a second tool but I forget the name.

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Found it; name of Glaze: https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/

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relevant nightshade discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39058428

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Unfortunately, I would assume all public works, and many private ones, on the internet have been consumed by LLM training models, and done so illegally, in my opinion. Finding out if it has been consumed is also probably impossible. You could try filing a Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA), but that is no simple matter.

I think the core problem here is you have this false notion of ownership of a thought that you have released into the world. As if once it is left you you somehow still have absolute control over that. That is a bizarre concept that has only become a legal construct in modern times. This has not been the case for the majority of human history.

If you don't want your creative works consumed by others don't release them anywhere outside of your direct control. That is essentially means don't even share them to your friends. Because once a song has left your voice it's there and anyone can use it. Being conflicted and unable to sleep over this inane concept of ownership of thoughts I think is your root problem here it has nothing to do with AI or other people's uses of things.

It's like arguing that artists should have a say about how they should be paid for their work at the dawn of the mp3 revolution.

If you've ever been in a riot you'll know it's impossible to argue with people once the looting frenzy takes hold.

Maybe once the dust settles we can see what's left over and finally have a serious conversation about protecting our artistic commons against future incursions?

In the meantime I'm just going to leave you with this:

The next time someone tries to convince you that the existence of _any_ black box somehow negates your creative ownership of your work, ask them this:

"Have you ever created any art of your own?"

The responses are illuminating.

I will take you seriously.

If you act in good faith you are not responsible for bad outcomes.

There is no "if only I had ..." You can't go back, it's a waste of energy and you can't know what the outcome would have been.

If you knowingly did something wrong try to seek atonement.

Otherwise keep contributing to the world in the best way you can.

Apparently the original author says no one is allowed to comment on this post unless you have purchased their work. I'm not sure why they would post something on hacker News asking a question if they're only soliciting answers from those who purchase their work? It would seem to be better to ask the question of their customers of which I'm guessing 99% of hacker News is not.

Being challenged on your core premise is part of answering a question and it does not matter if it is a customer or not.

You can't. That is the reality we live in now. Tools like Nightshade and Glaze are already behind the curve, decimate the quality of your work visually, and even if they do work, they will always be playing catch up to models.

Skynet and Terminators are inevitable.

It's just silly images and videos really. Military use would be using them to spread misinformation about the enemy? Idk that's been a think since forever, you don't really need some text to video model like for that instead of just "traditional" deepfakes and I feel like the impact is gonna be a lot less now that it's on everyone's mind that things can be fake. Actual weapons like drones don't really have much to do with image generators