Protecting Artwork from AI
The unprecedented rapid growth of artificial intelligence has created new opportunities for visual art, but it has also raised pressing concerns for artists, and rightfully so. AI systems train themselves by web crawling, scraping, and analyzing huge datasets, which include publicly available paintings, photographs and designs, all without consent. The concept of an Implied License provides one of the leeways for this in addition to the fair use defense; therefore, actively protecting your artistic expressions will require a combination of legal awareness and technical safeguards.
Implied License
An implied license is the idea that if you make your work available publicly, you are implicitly giving permission for uses that are 'normal' in that space, that 'normal' use being scraping and derivative generation in this day and age. For example, if you post a painting on Instagram, you imply that Meta can look at it and train its AI on it (unless you have a private account). By posting your work online, especially without technical locks, you give an implied license for machines to read and learn from it. This is not clearly tested in India, but it is a strong argument in tech law, because the Courts look at what a 'reasonable user' would expect. This doctrine has also been accepted in various Court cases outside India. Once an implied license is found, your case weakens because the law sees you as having consented to the AI.
The harsh truth is that there is almost no defense against this argument, unless you keep your work protected behind strict access walls. Even then, screenshots or leaks can break that wall. Artists must understand that once something is on the open internet, a layer of control is already lost. Until India brings about clear rules about AI training and scraping, your best tools are preventive.
Basic Protection
Basic protections include watermarks (Digimarc, Watermarkly) or metadata tags recording ownership. These are not perfect because AI scrapers often ignore or strip data, but it builds a trail of proof. Some artists now use platforms that give special digital licenses (for example, Creative Commons license choosers, which help artists choose licenses like CC BY-NC-ND, preventing commercial/derivative uses). Still, Indian Courts are only starting to deal with AI scraping cases, with verdicts pending, so enforcement is behind in practice.
Thorough Protection
- Tools like Mist, Anti-DreamBooth, and Glaze apply minuscule changes to the pixels, invisible to the human eye but undecipherable to AI. Glaze is more user-friendly, while the other two may require a bit of coding skill.
- Cara is a sharing platform made as a response to the frustrations around AI. It automatically adds 'NoAI' tags, which tell web crawling and scraping programs not to copy the images. This system depends on AI companies choosing goodwill, but it is nonetheless a safer option than posting with no protection at all.
- DeviantArt is also a platform to consider posting your work at, since it now offers creators to opt out of having their artwork trained on.
- Nightshade actively 'poisons' your images for AI by embedding misleading elements.
Vigilance and Care
- There is also a tool called Have I Been Trained, made by an artist-run group called Spawning AI. It lets you search and see if your images are included in big open-source AI training datasets.
- If you add your images to Spawning AI’s 'Do Not Train' list, these companies will agree to leave your images out of their future AI training. Still, this works only because these companies are willing to cooperate. It is not a mandate or a law.
- Pixsy helps you track trained on works and send takedown notices.
- Content Authenticity Initiative by Adobe helps embed provenance metadata in artworks, showing authorship and edits.
- It is always advised for artists to get a copyright certificate for their works. Additionally, Safe Creative is another free and paid online registry that protects your work globally, under the Berne Convention, which India is a signatory of.
Artists can protect their works, but they must think like both creators and gatekeepers in this unprecedented era. Copyright is automatic, but works are easily utilised by third parties without you knowing. The strongest line of defense is controlling access by third parties and keeping strong ownership records. The safest assumption is that anything online can and will be scanned. The only real safety is to decide what you keep private, what you share, and how fast you act when something is misused.