Slide 6 · Who Does This
Who poisons a model — and why.
It isn't always a shadowy hacker. Sometimes it's an artist. Sometimes it's a crowd.
🕵️The Supply-Chain Attacker
MALICIOUS
Uploads a tampered model or dataset to a public hub, hoping you'll download and trust it.
🤬The Coordinated Crowd
MALICIOUS
Floods a system that learns from user input with toxic content — like the trolls who broke Tay.
🎨The Defensive Artist
PROTECTIVE
Poisons their own work (e.g. Nightshade) to stop AI from training on it without consent.
🤷The Careless Contributor
UNINTENTIONAL
Feeds unverified or biased data into a pipeline with no malice — poisoning by accident.
That last one matters: not all poisoning is an attack. Unvetted data and sloppy pipelines poison models every day without anyone meaning to.