- Dr. Ben Yanbin Zhao, a professor at the University of Chicago, who is behind various efforts including Nightshade and Glaze to develop tools to “poison” online visual images to prevent them from being used to train AI models.
- Stability AI and other defendants won their motion to stop him seeing their confidential information, including datasets.
- Magistrate Judge Cisneros ruled that Zhao’s interests were adversarial to the defendants: “Dr. Zhao has not agreed to cease developing other so-called “data-poisoning tools” during the course of this litigation or to cease researching how to make image-generating AI models less effective.”
- And the Judge also ruled that Zhao didn’t have unique knowledge in image generators to justify his access to the confidential information: But Defendants demonstrate that it is not “such a nichefield that there is only one qualified expert.” Defendants point to numerous academic papers addressing text-to-image generation; they reason that, between the hundreds of authors of these papers, it is not feasible that “Plaintiffs couldn’t find anyone with the ability to explain
how generative image models behave” aside from Dr. Zhao.”
Dr.Ben Yanin Zhao, one of Sarah Andersen’s experts, cannot get access to confidential information, including datasets of Stability AI and other defendants in Andersen v. Stability AI.
His adversarial work on developing tools to poison images so they sabotage AI models’ ability to learn from them, plus his unwillingness to say he would no longer work on sabotage-type tools, rendered him a functional competitor to the AI companies who rely on such data.
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