FIGHTING FIRE FOR FIRE: 3 STRATEGIES FOR PROTECTING YOUR CONTENT FROM AI THEFT

The bad news is that AI is stealing our content. If you're a content creator--a writer, videographer, artist, musician, or similar--AI may have already repurposed your content. That's why Getty Images, Universal Music Group, George R.R. Martin, Sarah Silverman, the New York Times, and more are suing AI developers for copyright infringement. At the same time, in the business world, those who don't use AI risk falling behind or producing work at a rate that's too slow to keep up with new expectations and demand. So, the paradox for creators is clear. And AI isn't going anywhere. Language learning models like ChatGPT and Claude have become ubiquitous fixtures of creative workflows. AI image generation tools like Dall-E and Midjourney have been used in ads by big brands like Burger King and Progressive, and a search for "AI music" reveals pages of tools anyone can use to create generative AI music. In fact, AI use has become so prevalent that experts forecast global market revenue of AI usage in marketing alone to reach $36 billion this year. AI is disrupting industries across the board. In a blog post outlining how AI will change how we use computers, Bill Gates explained that individuals and companies will eventually have personal "AI agents" capable of performing just about every task imaginable, from scheduling appointments to designing customized apps. So how about that good news I mentioned? Well, the good news is that you can not only use AI to (ethically) enhance your workflow--you can also use it to fight back. Strategy 1: Create an AI Agent of Yourself One of the most helpful things about language learning models is that you can train most of them to mirror your specific voice. Projects like Coachvox AI, founded by Jodie Cook, allow creators, authors, coaches, and consultants to train AI models with their original content, preserving their unique style and perspective and protecting their IP. These AI avatars can interact with your audience, providing mentoring and guidance based on your frameworks and insights. You can also use your AI avatar to bounce ideas off of "yourself" and speed up your creative process. Creators can even monetize by charging a monthly fee for access to the personalized guidance and support their AI avatars provide. This is a fantastic, ethical way to scale impact without sacrificing quality or brand authenticity. Strategy 2: Deploy AI Poison and Code Blocks Computer scientists Ben Zhao and Heather Zheng at the University of Chicago recently launched two tools, Glaze and Nightshade, that protect visual creative work from being used without permission by AI models. Both AI tools "poison" AI outputs by introducing changes to digital content that are invisible to humans, but disruptive to AI training and scraping processes. Glaze is intended to protect individual artists' styles from being mimicked by AI. This tool alters some of an image's pixels in ways the human eye doesn't notice while fundamentally destroying what an AI can understand about it. So, a "Glazed" image of a cartoon puppy could cause AI to "see" a piece of cake in the style of Van Gogh. Nightshade takes AI poisoning one step further. Where Glaze takes a "defensive" approach, Nightshade is considered an "offensive" tool that actively sabotages what AI models will output for users in future sessions. Like Glaze, Nightshade adds subtle changes to pixels in artwork that corrupt AI model training data. This pollution causes affected AIs to learn wildly incorrect patterns and produce unpredictable, incorrect results that don't align with user prompts. And while we don't yet have "poison" for written content scraped by LLMs, you can add code blocks on your website--like the ones implemented by Tony Stubblebine, CEO of Medium--to block content from being visible to AI crawlers. Strategy 3: Build and Share on Dark Social More than ever, people consume publicly but share privately through text messages, Discord channels, WhatsApp chats, emails, and more. Basically, if a platform has DMs, you can expect that people are sharing content through them. This creates a "dark social" realm where marketers and trackers--and AI--can't see what's being shared. While this might not be a comprehensive solution (individual users could potentially still copy and paste your content into various AIs), it is one way to fight against the kind of internet-search-AI-scraping models like ChatGPT and Google Gemini have the power to perform. And here's something else: AI can't access information from password-protected platforms. So, if you publish your content on a site that requires authentication to access--like Patreon, private Facebook groups, and similar--AI can't see it (at least, for now). So, while AI may pose challenges to content creators, creators are far from powerless. By using AI tools to enhance your own creative processes, deploying emerging technologies to protect your work, and being intentional about where and how you share, creators and innovators can harness the power of AI rather than be steamrolled by it. EXPERT OPINION BY SHAMA HYDER, FOUNDER AND CEO, ZEN MEDIA @SHAMA