In the 19th century, disgruntled French factory workers devised a clever form of asymmetrical warfare against their employers. They would throw their wooden shoes, called sabots, into the machinery, causing it to grind to a halt (hence the word "sabotage"). In 2023, artists are attempting to do much the same thing, but against a far more abstract piece of machinery: generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI)

In this case, the proverbial wooden shoe is a piece of software called Nightshade. Before uploading their work to the net, an artist can run their images through Nightshade, which will modify each pixel in a way that is not visible to humans, but that disrupts the ability of GenAI bots to make sense of them.