Yeah, that makes sense.

It's like really hard to mask and distort an image without masking and distorting an image.

So they're able to do this in a way that we can't perceive, but what does that look like from the AI's perspective?

Another great question.

To train an image-generating AI model to pump out pictures, you give it lots of images along with descriptive text.

The model learns to associate certain words with visual features– think shapes or colors, but really it's something else we can't necessarily perceive because it's a computer.

And under the hood, all of these associations are stored within basically multidimensional maps.

So similar concepts and types of features are clustered near one another.

With the algorithm that underlie Glaze and Nightshade, the computer scientists strategically force associations between unrelated concepts, so they move points on that multidimensional map closer and closer together.

Yeah, I think I can wrap my head around how that would confuse an AI model.