The nuances of this are beyond me, but I feel like it's likely this would eventually be overcome.

Your best protection from having your images manipulated is to keep them off the internet if at all possible (we can only control what we post).

Basically I'm saying to treat the internet as hostile. Which is unfortunate, but accurate.

This'll work for about a week. The image generation applications' devs will get hold of some of the inner workings and figure out how to make their networks detect and ignore those minor manipulations. It'll turn into yet another arms race with no winner or loser, just rapid, incremental changes.

This would be so easily bypassed that the whole concept, while technologically cool, is completely useless. Someone could apply a very subtle smoothing filter and then do whatever they wanted with it after via stable diffusion (or use the myriad of alternative methods to remove the "protection").

What happens if you take a picture of the screen with your phone? Not ideal in terms of quality but I'm willing to bet it would work as a stupid easy bypass.

What I'd like to see is an image format that is digitally signed by default so that modifications can be flagged and the source can be verified. Yeah people could modify them for malicious use cases (I don't think it will be possible to ever prevent that unfortunately) but at least we'd know that it wasn't the original. This doesn't work for cases where people want to be anonymous but for things like social media selfies and posts where people are visible it could be helpful in preventing people spreading deepfakes and claiming they're real.

This is promising. Glaze was simply too intrusive for most people to be willing to use it regularly.

I'm not well versed in this at all, but would this also work if the "attacker" were to take a screenshot of the image they wanted to alter, and plug that into an AI tool? It sounds more like metadata tweaking from the article, which would be bypassed by a screenshot.