Wacom’s found a use for blockchain – and it will protect your art from AI

Wacom has found a way to wrangle one controversial tech, blockchain, to dampen the impact of another, generative AI. Wacom Yuify is a service, in beta for Adobe, that enables digital artists and photographers to permanently record ownership of their work on the blockchain, to then control the legal use of those images through licensing.

Wacom Yuify is already available as a plugin for Photoshop (ironic given Adobe’s stance on content use), and a beta version will be released for Clip Paint Studio at the end of June, and the excellent Rebelle shortly. (Read our Rebelle 7 review for more on this app – it’s recommended.)

When I caught up with Wacom CEO Nobutaka Ide at this year’s VFX Festival he shared a little more on the brand’s approach to AI, telling me Wacom is not anti-AI and Yuify is not a “giant platform guys protection scheme”, but instead a plugin to enable artists to “self authenticate and self-manage their artwork […] “A first step”.

He added: “Put simply, the idea is ‘let’s protect an artist’s portfolio’, let’s authenticate the tight engagement between an artist and their work.”

Using blockchain technology could raise an eyebrow amongst artists burned by NFTs, but as Nobutaka mentioned, Yuify is not about a big corporation cashing in. The immutable nature of the blockchain and self-sovereign identity (SSI) technology is ideal for ensuring art ownership has a recorded digital footprint.

The authenticator works in a simple way, and there are details on the Yuify website, but here’s a summary: Once an artwork is created and exported via Yuify as a JPEG or PNG it adds an invisible ‘micro-mark’, non-destructive pixels, into the image, this is then connected permanently to an artist on the blockchain. The image can be traced by the artist, and there’s even a tool, Yuifinder, to discover if an image’s creator (just drag and drop images into the tool).

Importantly Yuify (which is part of the Creative Rights Initiative) also offers a License Builder tool so artists can set use and reuse terms, as with any image exported through the service these licences are recorded forever on the blockchain.

In our chat Nobutaka said this isn’t a solution to preventing art from being scraped, but it’s a step forward. Being able to provide evidence of authorship and ownership is a good thing to have. Yuify also acts as a stamp of authentication, proof if it were needed that a work of art is human-made.

The good news too, is you don’t need to use a Wacom drawing tablet to use Yuify, so you can use any of the best drawing tablets available now. If you want to try Yuify, sign-up to the Wacom beta.