Using AI to protect against AI image manipulation | MIT News

As we enter a new era where technologies powered by artificial intelligence can craft and manipulate images with a precision that blurs the line between reality and fabrication, the specter of misuse looms large. Recently, advanced generative models such as DALL-E and Midjourney, celebrated for their impressive precision and user-friendly interfaces, have made the production of hyper-realistic images relatively effortless. With the barriers of entry lowered, even inexperienced users can generate and manipulate high-quality images from simple text descriptions — ranging from innocent image alterations to malicious changes. Techniques like watermarking pose a promising solution, but misuse requires a preemptive (as opposed to only post hoc) measure. 

In the quest to create such a new measure, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) developed “PhotoGuard,” a technique that uses perturbations — minuscule…