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PSA: A simple watermark trick that saved my portfolio from AI scrapers
I had about 200 of my digital paintings on ArtStation (you know, the ones I spent months on). Last month I noticed someone was running them through an AI model without my permission. So I started adding a faint, repeating pattern watermark across the whole image - not just a logo in the corner. The scraper bots can't crop it out easily, and it ruins the training data. Has anyone else found a way to block those crawlers?
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johnson.river2d ago
Why would you care if someone trains an AI on your paintings? You already posted them online for free, so the damage is done whether a human or a machine looks at them. Those faint watermarks just make your portfolio look unprofessional and harder for actual clients to enjoy. Plus, the scraper bots will probably just sharpen the image or inpaint over the pattern anyway since they're getting smarter every month. The real problem is people acting like putting pixels on the internet gives them some kind of permanent ownership over how those pixels get used by others. If you're that worried about protection, keep your work on your hard drive and skip the public gallery.
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Man, I feel you on this. It's frustrating putting work into something and then having it fed to some machine without a word. @johnson.river is wrong about one thing though: posting online isn't giving up all rights. It's about basic respect from the people using your stuff. That watermark trick is clever and I might steal it for my own gallery. The faint repeating pattern is smart because it messes with the AI's brain without ruining the look for human eyes. Keep fighting the good fight, don't let anyone tell you it's not worth protecting your work.
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taylor95711h ago
@phoenix_martin40 I got a lot less bitter once I started adding visible timestamps to my image metadata. The faint watermark plus a clear creation date in the file info made it easier to prove my case if I ever needed to. It's not a perfect fix but it gave me some peace of mind.
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