This technology could be used to copyrights as well.
>The watermark doesn’t change the image or video quality. It’s added the moment content is created, and designed to stand up to modifications like cropping, adding filters, changing frame rates, or lossy compression.
But does it survive if you use another generative image model to replicate the image?
These sorts of tools will only be able to positively identify a subset of genAI content. But I suspect that people will use it to 'prove' something is not genAI.
In a sense, the identifier company can be an arbiter of the truth. Powerful.
Training people on a half-solution like this might do more harm than good.
I genuinely feel that in this AI world we need the inverse. That every analogue or digital photo taken by traditional means of photography will need to be signed by a certificate, so anyone can verify its authenticity.
Years ago, I worked at Apple at the same time as Ian Goodfellow. This was before ChatGPT (I'd say around 2019).
I had the chance to chat with him, and what I remember most was his concern that GANs would eventually be able to generate images indistinguishable from reality, and that this would create a misinformation problem. He argued for exactly what you’re mentioning: chips that embed cryptographic proof that a photo was captured by a camera and haven't been modified.
It's security through obscurity. I'm sure with the technical details or even just sufficient access to a predictive oracle you could break this.
But I suppose it ads friction so better than nothing.
Watermarking text without affecting it is an interesting seemingly weird idea. Does it work any better than (with knowledge of the model used to produce said text), just observing the perplexity is low because its "on policy" generated text.
Note that watermarking (yes, including text) is a requirement[1] of the EU AI Act, and goes into effect in August 2026, so I suspect we'll see a lot more work in this space in the near future.
[1] Specifically, "...synthetic audio, image, video or text content, shall ensure that the outputs of the AI system are marked in a machine-readable format and detectable as artificially generated or manipulated", see https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/50/
Long-form content from controlled providers is by far the lion's share of what needs this regulation, at least at the moment. Perfect is the enemy of good enough. Or at least of better than the status-quo.
This is great, but there is no way for me to verify if groups or nation states can pay for a special contract where they do not have to have their outputs watermarked.
Reposting a comment I made on an earlier thread on this.
We need to be super careful with how legislation around this is passed and implemented. As it currently stands, I can totally see this as a backdoor to surveillance and government overreach.
If social media platforms are required by law to categorize content as AI generated, this means they need to check with the public "AI generation" providers. And since there is no agreed upon (public) standard for imperceptible watermarks hashing that means the content (image, video, audio) in its entirety needs to be uploaded to the various providers to check if it's AI generated.
Yes, it sounds crazy, but that's the plan; imagine every image you post on Facebook/X/Reddit/Whatsapp/whatever gets uploaded to Google / Microsoft / OpenAI / UnnamedGovernmentEntity / etc. to "check if it's AI". That's what the current law in Korea and the upcoming laws in California and EU (for August 2026) require :(
What about spoofing a SynthID false positive for a real image or video? Who can arbitrate what is true?
I think that AI service providers should have safeguards and encoded attribution. This solution helps when people lazily share things with friends or on social media I suppose, rather than stopping motivated bad actors.
The only way to actually implement this I think would be to ban all local models, and to have the service providers store perceptual hashes all generated images and video. It feels like the cat's out of the bag already though (for images at least).
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 47.5 ms ] thread>The watermark doesn’t change the image or video quality. It’s added the moment content is created, and designed to stand up to modifications like cropping, adding filters, changing frame rates, or lossy compression.
But does it survive if you use another generative image model to replicate the image?
"Generate a pure white image." "Generate a pure black image." Channel diff, extract steganographic signature for analysis.
In a sense, the identifier company can be an arbiter of the truth. Powerful.
Training people on a half-solution like this might do more harm than good.
I had the chance to chat with him, and what I remember most was his concern that GANs would eventually be able to generate images indistinguishable from reality, and that this would create a misinformation problem. He argued for exactly what you’re mentioning: chips that embed cryptographic proof that a photo was captured by a camera and haven't been modified.
https://ai.google.dev/responsible/docs/safeguards/synthid
But I suppose it ads friction so better than nothing.
Watermarking text without affecting it is an interesting seemingly weird idea. Does it work any better than (with knowledge of the model used to produce said text), just observing the perplexity is low because its "on policy" generated text.
What incentive do open models have to adopt this?
[1] Specifically, "...synthetic audio, image, video or text content, shall ensure that the outputs of the AI system are marked in a machine-readable format and detectable as artificially generated or manipulated", see https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/50/
Some previous discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071677
I'm thinking of historical images, where there aren't a huge number of existing images and no more will ever be created.
If I see something labeled "Street scene in Paris, 1905". I want to know if it is legit.
We need to be super careful with how legislation around this is passed and implemented. As it currently stands, I can totally see this as a backdoor to surveillance and government overreach.
If social media platforms are required by law to categorize content as AI generated, this means they need to check with the public "AI generation" providers. And since there is no agreed upon (public) standard for imperceptible watermarks hashing that means the content (image, video, audio) in its entirety needs to be uploaded to the various providers to check if it's AI generated.
Yes, it sounds crazy, but that's the plan; imagine every image you post on Facebook/X/Reddit/Whatsapp/whatever gets uploaded to Google / Microsoft / OpenAI / UnnamedGovernmentEntity / etc. to "check if it's AI". That's what the current law in Korea and the upcoming laws in California and EU (for August 2026) require :(
Also, if it's essentially a sort of metadata, can't the output generated image be replicated (e.g. screenshot) and thus stripped of any such data?
I think that AI service providers should have safeguards and encoded attribution. This solution helps when people lazily share things with friends or on social media I suppose, rather than stopping motivated bad actors.
The only way to actually implement this I think would be to ban all local models, and to have the service providers store perceptual hashes all generated images and video. It feels like the cat's out of the bag already though (for images at least).
Remove/Bypass Google's SynthID AI Watermark - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46692023 - Jan 2026 (1 comment)
SynthID – A tool to watermark and identify content generated through AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071677 - Aug 2025 (83 comments)
SynthID Detector – a new portal to help identify AI-generated content - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44045946 - May 2025 (1 comment)