Fuck AI

Glaze (aka Nightshade) implants 'poisoned' data in your images that will ruin any data sets they're put into.

Trying to prevent bits from being copied is always going to be futile.

In the long-ago times, websites that didn't want crawlers to scrape them had a /robots.txt file that described what was and wasn't allowed to be scraped.

But, the AI companies completely ignore that file. In fact, if anything, they may use it to find the "juicier" stuff to scrape. I know plenty of people who have decades of experience in running web servers who are going to extreme lengths (like banning entire countries, or huge IP ranges) to prevent what amounts to a DDOS on their servers from AI-company scrapers, because anything less extreme than that doesn't work. For some of these people, more than 90% of the traffic they get is from AI scrapers. In fact, it seems like if you try to do something to discourage scrapers from AI companies, they think there's something even juicier there and work even harder to get at it.

If they can find it, they'll ingest it. And, these companies have spent literal billions on working around any attempt to prevent them from ingesting things, because they believe that whichever company manages to ingest the most content will come up with the best model.

If you have some kind of moral exception to your work ever ending up in an LLM, then you're really out of luck. You better take up oil painting and never allow pictures of your art to be taken. The slop machines are hungry, and anything that becomes bits and ends up online will eventually be scraped.

As for making money as an artist, that's another matter. It has always been hard, now it's even harder. I don't think you'll make it easier for yourself by trying to prevent your stuff from being scraped. That just adds extra headaches you don't need.

The short answer is that you can't, really, anymore. You can put up barriers, but if your work is sufficiently "good" or popular, it will eventually leak and be ingested. Authentication (i.e. completely private websites) is the only real protection, but it has to be controlled by you or someone you trust, and in that case you're severely limiting your reach/availability.

As a creator, I feel that my only recourse is to find an audience that will trust and respect me regardless of whether others steal my work. Foster that community. Sadly, there will always be plagiarists. But I hope communities (like on the fediverse) will become strong enough to be self-sufficient.

Anything that can be copied can eventually be leaked. However, if you are OK with just reducing the chance by 99%, a private repo/page with an "ask me for access" instruction keeps pretty much all current LLM scrapers out.