Image Protection Options (beta)

Catbox Spaces now lets content creators on the Creator Core plan protect their images using Mist-V2 anti-AI image protection, directly from their Space!

Understanding Mist-V2

Mist-V2 is an image preprocessing tool that allows artists to protect their work from being used to train AI models. Mist-V2 works by adding a "mist" to the image, rendering them ineligible to be used in model training. If misted images are used in training, it poisons the resulted model, and produces garbage generations.

Using Mist-V2 on Catbox Spaces

Catbox Spaces Creator Core plan allows artists to upload up to 250 images per month to be processed through our Mist-V2 service. There are 3 levels of protection available: Light, Medium, and Heavy. See the source example here.

• Light: This level of misting applies a very light level of disruption to the image. On most artwork with complex backgrounds this is near imperceptible, while artwork with solid color backgrounds may have a slightly more perceptible effect. Example
• Medium: This level of misting applies visible disruption to all images. This level is recommended for public image posting on sites that may scrape your images for AI training. Example
• Heavy: This level of misting applies very visible distortion to all images. This level is only recommended when posting images on sites/areas with known AI scraping/training. Example

The level you chose is dependent on your concern for your artwork being used for training. If you have a very distinct art style, you may want to mist your images more heavily when posted on sites that may use your image for AI training. Catbox Spaces automatically blocks known image scraping botnets from your Space, so it may be appropriate to use either light or no misting on images posted to your Space.

When you submit images to be misted on Catbox Spaces, it is submitted to the job queue. With our current hardware, it takes approximately 20 minutes to mist 15 images. We recommend you upload no more than 20 images for processing at once. Once your images have been processed, you will receive an email to the email address associated with your Space with a Litterbox link to a zip file of your misted images. If you have questions about your job, please submit a ticket!

Important Note: Transparent PNG images will have a black background inserted. We don't recommend putting transparent images through Mist-V2.

Limitations of Mist-V2

Mist-V2 works by generating noisy garbage over artwork. This poisons models trained on them, which results in distorted generations. As noted in the Mist-V2 documentation, "Mist-v2 may only raise the cost of a motivated and professional attacker and help against someone who’s not really trying or not an expert. It is not a perfect solution but would be certainly better than nothing".