Artists turn AI against itself with tools designed to protect their work and break the algorithm — here’s how they are ‘poisoning the well’

This AI generated image depicts a well being poisoned by a balloon.

Artists are turning to technology to combat the growing threat from artificial intelligence-powered image generators such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. New techniques allow them to adapt their images by a few pixels to look fine to humans but “poison the well” for AI tools.

While some AI image models only use licensed content, including Adobe’s Firefly and those from Google or Meta, others are trained by scraping the open web for source material.