TIME magazine announced Sept. 5 that it has named Ben Zhao, the University of Chicago Neubauer Professor of Computer Science, to its TIME100 AI list.
The TIME100 AI list celebrates individuals who are shaping the future of AI, a technology that continues to revolutionize industries. As TIME highlights, the rapid growth of AI is driven not just by the technology itself, but by the people behind it—those who make critical decisions about its development, safety, and application.
Zhao's recognition on this list highlights his significant contributions and leadership, particularly in the areas of adversarial machine learning and security—a field that explores how machine learning models can be manipulated and how to defend against such attacks.
He is particularly known in the field for protective tools to mitigate harms of AI, including tools like Nightshade and Glaze, which artists can apply to their works to protect them from being scraped and used without consent to train AI models.
Innovation and impact
Zhao's research has spanned a broad range of areas, including networking, human-computer interaction, and security and privacy. Since 2016, he has focused on addressing security and privacy challenges in machine learning and mobile systems. Most recently, his work has centered on adversarial machine learning and developing tools to protect human creatives from the potential harms of generative AI models.
“My experiences across different areas (but especially in human-computer interaction) has taught me the value of engaging with users to truly understand how research and technology impacts real people,” said Zhao. “As a result, I am always drawn to research challenges that impact large groups of people, and projects that address those challenges by taking into account perspectives of the users most directly impacted.”
He is particularly known in the field for tools to mitigate harms of AI. This line of work began in 2020, with Fawkes, an image cloaking tool designed to prevent third parties from building unauthorized facial recognition models of individuals based on public photos online.
Zhao’s team also developed Nightshade, which proactively protects content copyright of visual artwork by making them toxic to AI models that train on them without consent, and Glaze, which protects individual artists against style mimicry.
These programs make changes to an image that are nearly imperceptible to the human eye, but significantly change what the AI “sees.”
Since its release in January 2024, Nightshade has been downloaded nearly a million times.
As AI continues to evolve at a breakneck pace, the insights and innovations of leaders like Zhao will play a crucial role in shaping the technology's future.
“The recent rush towards generative AI has been spurred on by an aura of inevitability, promises of societal benefits, and massive profits,” Zhao warned. “While many of these have yet to materialize, harms like copyright violation, proliferation of AI slop and deepfakes, and disruption to creative sectors are here today. These are the harms our lab works to mitigate through our research.”
Zhao is an ACM Fellow and a recipient of the NSF CAREER award, the Internet Defense Prize, and MIT Technology Review’s TR-35 Award, among others. His work has been featured in prominent media outlets such as the New York Times, Scientific American, NBC, CNN, BBC, and the Wall Street Journal, underscoring the broader societal impact of his research.
In addition to his research, Zhao is deeply involved in the academic community. He serves on technical program committees for top conferences in computer security (ACM CCS, IEEE Security & Privacy) and machine learning (NeurIPS). At University of Chicago, he co-directs the Security, Algorithms, Networking, and Data (SAND) Lab at UChicago alongside Neubauer Professor Heather Zheng and serves as the Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Computer Science.
“I’m humbled by this recognition, and proud to share it with my long-term collaborator Prof. Heather Zheng, our wonderful students, and the many human artists, writers and other creatives working with us to build a future ecosystem where human creativity is valued more than technology,” Zhao said.
- Adapted from an article first published by the Department of Computer Science.
—Sam Marsden
