Solei

Inspiration

Looking around us every day, we see that we are surrounded by the term "AI." This term gives some people feelings of excitement, but many are overwhelmed by trepidation--in particular, creative minds. We want to make a stand against the dishonest and irreverent use of AI by sabotaging datasets, one post at a time.

What it does

Solei is a framework that can be installed on any website with the click of a button. Websites protected by Solei see each piece of art protected using Solei's novel dataset poisoning technique. This process damages the learning process of AI.

How we built it

Using a thoughtful, eclectic combination of technologies, we leveraged the strengths of Rust, Python, JavaScript, Node.js, PyTorch, Svelte, and more. Solei itself is built primarily in Rust, with WebAssembly embeddings constructed using the eframe crate. We experimented with techniques we developed after reading various academic papers, training our own AIs with PyTorch. We developed a sample website with JavaScript and Svelte, demonstrating the ease of installing and implementing Solei.

Challenges we ran into

We definitely faced a multitude of challenges during out time making the project, from project-breaking clashes between asynchronous programming and memory safety, to machine learning blunders, we struggled with every facet of our program that paved the way to our final iteration.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Developing a novel technique based on our own research was by far the highlight of the project from a technical standpoint, but seeing every piece of our highly robust ecosystem work together is uniquely satisfying.

What we learned

When you're exploring unknown territory, bugs can happen in only the most impossible of ways--nearly every bug we encountered was undocumented in the context in which we discovered it. Moreover, perseverance is always the best option, but we learned not to conflate it with stubbornness. Being open-minded is always the best way to approach problems that arise as testaments to originality.

What's next for Solei

Solei is ready to grow into a business. With viable functionality as it stands, polishing and expanding on the framework would be straightforward. Solei should become a subscription-model service, allowing sites to give their users piece of mind year after year

Built With

• javascript
• node.js
• python
• pytorch
• rust
• svelte
• wasm