about
Steal My Artworks for Fine-Tuning? (arxiv.org)
1 point by jruohonen on Nov 27, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Artists can hide faint watermarks in their pictures without changing how the art looks. If stolen pictures are used to train a style-copying image generator, the watermarks spread into its outputs, and checking their pattern reliably exposes the theft even after scrubbing attempts.

Abstract · Steal My Artworks for Fine-tuning? A Watermarking Framework for Detecting Art Theft Mimicry in Text-to-Image Models

The advancement in text-to-image models has led to astonishing artistic performances. However, several studios and websites illegally fine-tune these models using artists' artworks to mimic their styles for profit, which violates the copyrights of artists and diminishes their motivation to produce original works. Currently, there is a notable lack of research focusing on this issue. In this paper, we propose a novel watermarking framework that detects mimicry in text-to-image models through fine-tuning. This framework embeds subtle watermarks into digital artworks to protect their copyrights while still preserving the artist's visual expression. If someone takes watermarked artworks as training data to mimic an artist's style, these watermarks can serve as detectable indicators. By analyzing the distribution of these watermarks in a series of generated images, acts of fine-tuning mimicry using stolen victim data will be exposed. In various fine-tune scenarios and against watermark attack methods, our research confirms that analyzing the distribution of watermarks in artificially generated images reliably detects unauthorized mimicry.

Ge Luo, Junqiang Huang, Manman Zhang, Zhenxing Qian, Sheng Li, Xinpeng Zhang
arXiv:2311.13619 · cs.CV, cs.CR · submitted Nov 22, 2023
abstract · pdf · html · A Watermarking Framework for Detecting Art Theft Mimicry in Text-to-Image Models

add comment on HN