The use of AI tools has been harmful, to say the least. Whether it’s generating images of naked celebrities to sell on eBay or artists losing jobs to AI-generated artwork, AI has been quite disrespectful to many creative minds. Considering that AI-generated art often uses stolen work from actual artists, many people are rightfully annoyed by the recent AI push.
For every option on the best AI chatbots list, there’s an equal number of AI image generation tools. Using artificial intelligence to create "artwork" has never been easier, and tools like the upcoming OpenAI Sora generator for videos will further exacerbate this problem. However, one hacking collective is protesting art theft by infecting users with malware.
ComfyUI_LLMVISION, an extension for Stable Diffusion that integrates GPT-4 and Claude 3 models into ComfyUI, was deleted from GitHub due to malware infection (via 404media). The NULLBULGE GROUP, responsible for infecting the popular extension, left a message on its website listing the "sins" that justify their actions, including crypto promotion, art theft, AI-generated artwork, and other theft from artists.
A public service announcement on the r/ComfyUI subreddit indicates that there is a webhook within the GitHub repository that sends data to a Discord server. This includes browser passwords, credit card details, and browsing history if you've used the extension. There's also a detailed guide on how to remove the issue. However, it appears the infected extension was also installing a keylogger on users' devices.
For now, if you use AI art tools, we recommend avoiding extensions on GitHub. Common AI generation tools don’t seem to be infected, with NULLBULGE primarily targeting repositories on GitHub. While GitHub is an excellent place to find great tools and software, you could risk having your data stolen by hackers if you’re not careful.
In other AI news, Apple Intelligence looks like the most exciting case of artificial intelligence, but Elon Musk is looking to ban iPhones in any of his companies due to the partnership between the smartphone manufacturer and OpenAI.