The short answer: no tool can guarantee your art won’t be used to train AI. But two free tools from the University of Chicago help. Glaze makes it harder for AI to copy your personal style. Nightshade makes your images harmful to models that train on them without permission. Used together, and combined with sensible posting habits, they raise the cost of scraping your work. This guide explains what each does, where they fall short, and how copyright law currently treats AI.
This is general information, not legal advice. Based on the Glaze Project’s and US Copyright Office’s own publications, checked September 29, 2026.
Glaze vs Nightshade at a Glance
| Glaze | Nightshade | |
|---|---|---|
| What it protects against | Style mimicry: someone fine-tuning a model to copy your style | Models that scrape and train on art without consent |
| How it works | Subtle changes to your image that make AI “see” a different style | Subtle changes that make AI “see” different content, teaching it wrong associations |
| Who it helps | You, individually | Artists as a group, by making unlicensed training costlier |
| Cost | Free | Free |
| Made by | The Glaze Project, University of Chicago | The same team |
The Glaze team puts the difference simply: Glaze is a defensive tool that “individual artists can use to protect themselves against style mimicry attacks,” while Nightshade is “an offensive tool that artists can use as a group to disrupt models that scrape their images without consent.”
What Glaze Does
Glaze adds changes to your image that people barely notice but that make an AI model read the style very differently. If someone later trains a model on your Glazed images to imitate you, the result drifts away from your real style.
What the Glaze team says about its limits:
- It’s “not a permanent solution.” As with any security tool, new techniques may eventually get around it. The team has published responses to known attacks, and updates Glaze over time (version 2.2 at the time of writing).
- Changes are more visible on flat colors and smooth backgrounds, such as some cartoon or graphic styles. Painterly, textured work hides them better.
- It’s less effective for styles already well known to AI models, because the model already learned them before you started Glazing.
- It can’t protect work that has already been scraped. It only helps for images you post from now on.
How to get it: the desktop app is a free download from the Glaze Project site, and it works best with a capable graphics card. WebGlaze runs in the browser for artists without a strong computer, but it’s invite-only; the Glaze site explains how to request access.
What Nightshade Does
Nightshade goes further. It changes an image so that a model training on it learns the wrong thing. In the team’s example, a person sees a cow in a field, but the AI sees a leather handbag. If a model trains on enough “shaded” images, it starts to produce handbags when asked for cows. The goal, in their words, “is not to break models, but to increase the cost of training on unlicensed data, such that licensing images from their creators becomes a viable alternative.”
Limits and cautions from the Nightshade team:
- It doesn’t protect your style. Nightshade on its own gives no protection against mimicry. The team warns: “Do not post shaded images of your art if you are at all concerned about style mimicry” unless they’re also Glazed.
- Changes are more visible on flat colors, just like Glaze. There’s a low-intensity setting if you want to keep visible changes to a minimum.
- It won’t stay effective forever, though the team says it can evolve to keep pace with countermeasures.
- It works offline. Neither Nightshade nor Glaze sends your art anywhere.
The team recommends that artists “should ideally have both Glaze AND Nightshade applied to their artwork,” and is working toward applying both in one pass through WebGlaze.
A Simple Protection Workflow
- Keep your originals private. Store full-resolution files offline or in private cloud storage.
- Export a web version at the size you’d normally post.
- Glaze it, and optionally Nightshade it. Check the result at full size; lower the intensity if the changes bother you on flat areas.
- Post only the protected version. Glaze and Nightshade survive cropping, compression and screenshots, so reposts carry the protection too.
- Sign and date your work in the file and keep your process files (sketches, layers, work in progress). They’re the best evidence that a piece is yours.
What US Copyright Law Says About AI
In January 2025, the US Copyright Office published Part 2 of its report on AI, about what can be copyrighted. Its main conclusions:
- Purely AI-generated images can’t be copyrighted. The work needs a human author.
- Prompts alone aren’t enough to make someone the author of the output, in the Office’s current view, because the prompt doesn’t control how the result is expressed.
- Human contributions are protected. If you paint over, edit, or combine AI output with your own work, your own creative contributions can be protected, and so can a creative selection and arrangement of material.
- Using AI as a tool doesn’t disqualify a work. Using AI to assist, the way you’d use Photoshop, doesn’t cancel copyright in the human-made parts.
For traditional artists, the takeaway is reassuring: your hand-made work stays fully yours, and using AI for reference or planning doesn’t change that. Whether training AI on copyrighted art without permission is legal is a separate question that courts are still deciding, and it’s covered in a different part of the Office’s report.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I remove my art from AI models that already trained on it?
Generally no. Once a model has been trained, individual images can’t practically be pulled out. Protection tools help for what you post from now on.
Will Glaze ruin how my art looks?
On textured, painterly work the changes are hard to see. On flat colors they’re more noticeable. Try it on a few pieces at different intensity settings before committing.
Does watermarking stop AI training?
A visible watermark discourages people from reposting your work, but it doesn’t stop a model from learning your style. Glaze and Nightshade work on a different level, on what the AI “sees” rather than on what people see.
Next Steps
- Want to use AI on your own terms? Read AI for Traditional Artists
- Learn the basics in What Is AI Art?
- Read our FAQ on selling AI art