The Kaz Windness Blog

Scroll down for social media sight ratings. Artists are finding it harder to protect their artwork from AI scraping theft. They are forced to delete imagery and leave social media platforms they once trusted due to terms of service changes that compromise our work and industries. Artists are asking, “How do I protect my art?” and “Where is it safe to post?” This entry seeks to answer those questions. I will do my best to update as new resources become available.

-And be sure to check out this incredible resource for Generative AI Resistance Activism: https://airesistlist.org/

-Join and sign the petition at Human Artistry Campaign

HOW DO I PROTECT MY ART FILES?

Signing and Watermarking: While both of these are easy to remove digitally, it’s important to communicate ownership to the general public, without damaging the integrity of the image too much. Clients and art directors don’t want to see big logos etched into your art. Signing and also hiding an extra signature or logo within the work can help prove general copyright infringement.

Partial Image: Crop image and tell viewers to find the full piece on your website or BlueSky. Hold hand or drawing tools over part of image to obsure and make scraping difficult.

Copyright Registration. As soon as you create an image, it is legally copyrighted as yours, but you have much better protection and the ability to take legal action with financial recourse if your art is officially copyrighted. It’s good art business hygiene to file copyright quarterly. Registering images as a group is recommended. Here is the link to the US Copyright Office: https://www.copyright.gov/
Downside: A law was passed in Feb. 2025 allowing generative Ai to be copywritten as long as there is human change and creativity applied. This lessens the strength of artist copyright protections. It also costs around $45 to $125 to file copyright. To keep costs down, copyright a group or collection of your images.

Ai Disturbance: Ibis Paint is a low-cost digital art program with an AI disturbance filter tool built into the save function. The program is here: https://ibispaint.com/?lang=en-US Instruction on how to use it here: https://www.instagram.com/kazwindness/reel/C7qESCOApGA/ This is fast and very easy to use. Glaze does something similar. See Image Poisoning below for more on this.
Downside: The glazing or disturbance filters provide some protection by making your art less reproducible, but these are not failsafe.

Image Poisoning

Foxglove June 2026 Foxglove – Poison Your Art For AI https://foxgloveapp.com. Developed by an artist for artists. Free, fast, has both web and iphone app options. What it does: 1. Metadata stripping – Removes EXIF, GPS, camera info, and other tracking data that scrapers or platforms use to identify you. 2. Adversarial perturbation – Adds invisible pixel-level noise that corrupts AI training data, making it “toxic” to models. 3. Hidden watermark/message – Embeds a custom message (e.g., your name, terms, or a note) into the image’s pixel data via steganography, visible only to AI systems.
Downside: Relatively new/no history, created by an individual rather than a university, so difficult to fully vet. From a user standpoint, unable to tell how actually effective this is from deterring scraping.

Nightshade along with Glaze help make your work unusable for Ai image generators. Here’s how and where to get the program downloads for free: https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html#
Downside: Nightshade is memory intensive, may need an NVidia graphics card, and can take 15 minutes or more to “poison” an art file. There is a web-based version called WebGlaze that can be used over the internet, but you need to request and create an account and will be vetted to make sure you are a real human artist. The embedded textures can make your art appear odd. It is designed to make Ai misidentify what your art is, making the results less reliable or unrecognizable, but software has been created to “clean” files and new software that reads imagery at the surface level and recreates it with AI.

Cloudfare: Free software that blocks crawlers, image scraping bots, can be set to prevent access or image download by suspicious visitors. Cloudflare: Build for the agent era
Downside: Can be difficult and somewhat time-consuming to figure out and set up.

Register your book with Authors Guild as “Human Authored.” Upside: This is a respected organization and a good trend towards human protections. https://authorsguild.org/news/human-authored-certification-expands-to-all-authors/

Downside: The cost is $10 per title for non-members and up to 10 titles per year for members and they allow AI-generated “outlining.” While I’m okay with traditional AI tech like spell check and grammar check, as a plotter, I can tell you outlining IS writing and allowing its use is utilizing plagiarized ideas, concepts, and is unoriginal and un-human. Also, why do we have to self-identify? It should be the AI-generated materials that should have to wear a sticker. Here. I made one. Use as you will:

For querying: When submitting or posting to social media, consider mentioning that you never using generative AI. For query letters, use plain or direct language. Describe your premise like you would describe a book to a friend. Stay on top of the “handwriting” of generative AI and avoid it. Even if that means giving up our precious em dashes. Publishers, agents, and readers are becoming more suspicious of AI use and rejecting it. Writers, NEVER use an AI generated or enhanced cover. We will assume you didn’t write the book if there is AI on the cover. Artists need to be in solidarity.

Contracts Template Sample Here: Sample Independent KidLit Illustration Contract – The Kaz Windness Blog

Add NO AI verbiage to all your contracts. Example: Client (publisher, author) agrees not to use artwork for AI machine learning or to modify the artwork in any way, including with generative AI tools, without prior express written permission from the artist. Additionally, client attests that they will not knowingly expose the artwork to generative AI machine learning.

For Authors/Publishers Hiring Artists: Artist agrees not to use any AI-generation in the art-making process. This includes sketches, image editing, or creation of artwork for the book cover or interior artwork. Artist attests that all artwork is of their own making and human-created.

For both: Generative AI Clause Illustrator agrees not to use any AI-generation in the art-making process. This includes sketches, image editing, or creation of artwork for the book cover or interior artwork. Illustrator attests that all artwork is of their own making and human created. Writer agrees not to use artwork for AI machine learning or to modify the artwork in any way, including with generative AI tools, without prior express written permission from the artist. Additionally, both writer and illustrator will not knowingly expose the writing or artwork to generative AI machine learning, including chatbot applications such as ChatGPT.

If illustrating human-only, non-AI-generated texts is important to you, you can add that verbiage to contracts.

Best practices for safely hiring an artist here: How Not to Get Scammed by AI “Artists” – The Kaz Windness Blog

Rating of Social Media Platforms for Artists and Email, Navigation, Spellcheck updated 1/09/2026

Remember to contact your local representatives and national legislators and urge them to protect artists’ rights, copyright, and human labor. 5 Calls is a great, easy resource for this. Several copyright lawsuits are in process that should result in better protections for artists, but we must stay vigilant and united in the meantime.