Now I’m curious about whether Disney funded Glaze & Nightshade. Quoting Nightshade’s FAQ, their lab has arranged to receive donations which are washed through the University of Chicago:

If you or your organization may be interested in pitching in to support and advance our work, you can donate directly to Glaze via the Physical Sciences Division webpage, click on “Make a gift to PSD” and choose “GLAZE” as your area of support (managed by the University of Chicago Physical Sciences Division).

Previously, on Awful, I noted the issues with Nightshade and the curious fact that Disney is the only example stakeholder named in the original Nightshade paper, as well as the fact that Nightshade’s authors wonder about the possibility of applying Glaze-style techniques to feature-length films.

Image and video generation AI can’t create good, novel, art, but it can serve up mediocre remixes of all the standard stuff with only minor defects an acceptable percentage of the time, and that is a value proposition soulless corporate executive are more than eager to take up. And that is just a bonus, I think your last fourth point is Disney’s real motive, establish a monetary value of their IP served up as slop, so they can squeeze other AI providers for their money. Disney was never an ally in this fight.

The fact that Sam was slippery enough to finagle this deal makes me doubt the analysts like Ed Zitron… they may be right from a rational perspective, but if Sam can secure a few major revenue streams and build moat through nonsense like this Disney deal… still it will be tough even if he has another dozen tricks like this one up his sleeves, smaller companies without all the debts and valuation of OpenAI can undercut his prices.