This new tool could protect your pictures from AI manipulation

The tool, called PhotoGuard, works like a protective shield by altering photos in tiny ways that are invisible to the human eye but prevent them from being manipulated. If someone tries to use an editing app based on a generative AI model such as Stable Diffusion to manipulate an image that has been "immunized" by PhotoGuard, the result will look unrealistic or warped. Right now, "anyone can take our image, modify it however they want, put us in very bad-looking situations, and blackmail us," says Hadi Salman, a PhD researcher at MIT who contributed to the research. It was presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning this week. PhotoGuard is "an attempt to solve the problem of our images being manipulated maliciously by these models," says Salman.