Art Guard: Protecting Your Online Images From Generative AI

Steps you can take to prevent bots from scraping and using your art to train AI models like Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and DALL-E

Art Guard, AI-Generated Image by DALL-E 3, Edited by Author

A lot of artists are worried about generative AI. They are concerned about web crawlers scraping images from their web pages to train AI models without permission and/or compensation.

I spent the last four weeks researching this topic and found a lot of information on how these models work and how to prevent the bots from stealing your work.

TL;DR — The easiest thing you can do is turn off AI crawler access to your website using settings in your hosting service, like SquareSpace and others. More details on this and other steps you can take are below.

In this article, I will provide some background on how text-to-image AI models work, including Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and DALL-E 3. Next, I will show you how to detect if these models have been using your images for training. Finally, I will give you advice and steps that you can take to prevent the bots from stealing your stuff.