Can Protective Perturbation Safeguard Personal Data from Being Exploited by Stable Diffusion?

Zhengyue Zhao, Jinhao Duan, Kaidi Xu, Chenan Wang, Rui Zhang, Zidong Du, Qi Guo, Xing Hu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 24398-24407

Stable Diffusion has established itself as a foundation model in generative AI artistic applications receiving widespread research and application. Some recent fine-tuning methods have made it feasible for individuals to implant personalized concepts onto the basic Stable Diffusion model with minimal computational costs on small datasets. However these innovations have also given rise to issues like facial privacy forgery and artistic copyright infringement. In recent studies researchers have explored the addition of imperceptible adversarial perturbations to images to prevent potential unauthorized exploitation and infringements when personal data is used for fine-tuning Stable Diffusion. Although these studies have demonstrated the ability to protect images it is essential to consider that these methods may not be entirely applicable in real-world scenarios. In this paper we systematically evaluate the use of perturbations to protect images within a practical threat model. The results suggest that these approaches may not be sufficient to safeguard image privacy and copyright effectively. Furthermore we introduce a purification method capable of removing protected perturbations while preserving the original image structure to the greatest extent possible. Experiments reveal that Stable Diffusion can effectively learn from purified images over all protective methods.