Web crawlers scan web pages and scrape data and images to help train AI products.

If your website has a lot of original graphics and artwork, you may want to consider using one of these free tools developed at The University of Chicago.

• Glaze: This protects your images from being mimicked by image generation algorithms.
• Nightshade: This goes on the offensive and acts as a poison pill, working to ruin a machine learning model that scrapes your images for its training without your consent.

Both of these work via a desktop app that makes small changes to your images which, while usually not perceptible to the human eye, will affect machine learning algorithms.

After running your imagery through either of these tools, you will need to reupload the modified images to your website, or continue to use the edited images when creating new content for your website.