Over the last decade, it’s no surprise that the relationship between artists and technology has become somewhat strained. With advent of deep learning algorithms, the alleged unlicensed scraping of artists’ online work by major tech companies, there’s a burgeoning animosity between contemporary art and where the internet could be heading. Now, smaller firms are readying up to provide the services that their larger competitors should have introduced in the first place – like Wacom with its recently announced 'anti-AI' platform Yuify.
Take the popularity of Nightshade for instance; an anti-AI piece of free software that allows artists to ‘poison’ deep learning programmes if used as part of their training data, and effectively prevents their work from being stolen. It received 250,000 downloads in the first week of release, marking a crucial first step fighting back against ‘algorithmic plagiarism’.
