How “Image Cloaking” Is The Latest Attempt To Prevent AI From Reading And Copying Online Images

In the early days of the web, there was a beautifully thought out element tag called "nofollow" that you could add to the coding of any webpage to prevent search engines from indexing that page. It worked and offered something that seems increasingly hard to get online these days: control. Not everyone is ready to accept losing this control. There are several startups working on tools that promise to allow digital creators, artists and the rest of us to shield images we share online from being ingested by AI algorithms and used for training the technology.

One of them called Glaze "protects images from unauthorized training by AI" and says it is "designed to disrupt the AI's ability to analyze the fine details in artwork." Another called simply Photoguard aims to protect what we all share online from “malicious manipulation by AI models.” Together, these startups are part of a growing ecosystem of "digital cloaking" technology that will continue to evolve as a counterbalance to the AI-fueled content revolution.