I came across tools like nightshade that can poison images. That way, if someone steals an artist's work to train their AI, it learns the wrong stuff and can potentially begin spewing gibberish.

Is there something that I can use on PDFs? There are two scenarios for me:

Content that I already created that is available as a pdf.
I use LaTeX to make new documents and I want to poison those from scratch if possible rather than an ad hoc step once the PDF is created.

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[–] toothbrush@lemmy.blahaj.zone 42 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Nightshade doesnt actually work btw. Denoising, a common technique, also breaks nightshade completely. Its also closed source, with no way to test if it actually works for the big AIs. The person making nightshade is really fishy too.

[–] slock@lemmy.world 10 points 3 days ago

Most actual poisoning techniques don't actually work that well. When I end up with a PDF, I usually strip out the existing text layer, apply a denoiser and a few other preprocessing steps to correct common errors, then a layout / reading order detector, and finally OCR the different blocs. This is against the most common poisoning techniques, and one of the most efficient, called : someone printed a document, forgot about it for 3 years, then scanned it slightly tilted (and dirty, crumpled, ...), and the scanner decided to apply its crappy OCR.

Using screenshots of the PDF also avoid any kind of font face poisoning, and anti copy protection.

If you really, really need to protect your PDF, please consider accessibility first, then what would work imho is to use the scripting features of pdf to actually render your content on the fly. That would probably mess up most of the "automatic" processes.