Aren't these kinds of watermarks easy to remove or distort? Seems like they're only helpful as long as people are relying on them sparingly so it's not worth the effort to circumvent.
If social media platforms started banning images with these watermarks seems like they'd be stripped out overnight.
I agree. This thread is so negative, seeing everything black and white. 99% of the users of these tools are never going to bother trying to figure out how to remove synthId. And then for the small percentage that do bother, they would have the knowledge to usage image models that don't use watermarking in the first place.
I'm annoyed that Google is keeping it closed-sourced and limited to partners. Is there a negative externality about open-sourcing image watermark technology so anyone can use it and audit the watermarks independently? If not, then I may have a repository for an open-source invisible and tamper-resistant image watermarking approach that's feature complete...
The fact that they have to keep this closed source is a giant red flag. It means that you can copy it or strip it if you have the knowledge.
I'm not all that worried about stripping it (I'm sure that's trivial).
The problem that I am worried about is that it can be copied (I'd bet $20 that's trivial, too). People WILL put this on images so that they can be "discredited".
Or perhaps a user id or fingerprint to an individual. We added that to printers long ago, this would easily enable that for every photo and image you generate too.
You: "performative nonsense! Arbitrary metadata not of my choosing!"
Also you: well, games go through some kind of distribution, which has plenty of telemetry and metadata. Whether it is App Store with notarization, or Steam or Itch who collect analytics and know a lot about you, or your ISP if you self host your eclectic WebGL game from home. Posting on an iPhone or Android phone, to hacker News which has your email address, on your cell network which has IPv6 globally unique addresses...
"But my choosing!" You'll say. It is extremely performative of you to say, "everything that would make me 200% wrong isn't valid."
I don't know. I really hate these vibes-driven reactions to (checks notes) content attribution. Every accusation is a confession in this frame of mind. How do you not see that?
NO OFFENSE - I think this is genuinely worth digging down that:
- you identify as an artist of sorts,
- you can't tell AI from human images, and
- you sound absolutely pissed off by this.
In my personal experience watching online flamewars, there seem to be two types of people when it comes to AI, even among highly tech literate, which are:
- those who can tell that an image was AI generated, instantly, even at thumbnail sizes, and manually drawn over
- those who can NOT, regardless of time or resource allotted. Tends to be perpetually angry(my prejudiced PoV).
I personally hate the state of AI image generators, but simultaneously I feel this goes above hate or ethics. There has to be some thing or process that's causing it, and it's probably not like IQ or EQ or autism or anything. Also, I am of opinion that there is some chances that prolonged exposure to AI generated data might be corrupting brains of pro-AI people, but that's again just my highly prejudiced PoV and not a fact.
What could be it? More/less exposure to older, simplistic examples? Prior exposure to human art? Childhood head traumas? Or something else?
First they verify whether a picture came from OpenAI, then they'll include subscriber data and geolocation.
Well, they'll finally find out that no one wants to look at AI generated pictures or text. Once they do that, the tool will fail for the public and only work for the government.
if you tell it to generate the AI image with a black background you can visually see the synthid with a good enough monitor, it's just a repeating fuzzy pattern, nothing special.
I have found great success of getting rid of it by masking every 2nd pixel, regenerating missing pixels and then once again masking every 2nd pixel offset by 1.
Used an off the shelf model to fill in the pixels, but I also exported a depthmap first (before any alternations) and denoised it so generated masked pixels comform to the original content. The result was obviously not 100% perfect, but with more time and a model fine tuned for this specific use-case would be able to remove any kind of ai watermarking without too many issues.
While this is definitely one of the topics of the moment. I find these threads really just ragebait magnets. A bunch of people effectively talking past one another: privacy vs preserving the status quo.
It's certain now that most of the Western world has slid into fascism. Privacy and common decency advocates are all but lost.
I will say this, for everyone celebrating this as something that is "extremely beneficial to the cultural moment",
If I were an adversarial nation-state actor, I might be extremely interested in reverse engineering this and poisoning the well by applying it to real images.
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 56.9 ms ] threadIf social media platforms started banning images with these watermarks seems like they'd be stripped out overnight.
So this is a big win IMO.
I'm not all that worried about stripping it (I'm sure that's trivial).
The problem that I am worried about is that it can be copied (I'd bet $20 that's trivial, too). People WILL put this on images so that they can be "discredited".
Can it be used to create something like nutritional labels for synthetic content? 10% synthetic text, 30 synthetic images.
Your reality was 15% synthetic today (75% mega corp, 25% open-weight neocloud).
As someone that creates things with tools with different media I would just hard avoid this tool that adds...
arbitrary metadata not of my choosing.
Should I seriously make a texture for a videogame with this weird DRM glorp in it?
How old is photoshop and why is it exempt?
Also you: well, games go through some kind of distribution, which has plenty of telemetry and metadata. Whether it is App Store with notarization, or Steam or Itch who collect analytics and know a lot about you, or your ISP if you self host your eclectic WebGL game from home. Posting on an iPhone or Android phone, to hacker News which has your email address, on your cell network which has IPv6 globally unique addresses...
"But my choosing!" You'll say. It is extremely performative of you to say, "everything that would make me 200% wrong isn't valid."
I don't know. I really hate these vibes-driven reactions to (checks notes) content attribution. Every accusation is a confession in this frame of mind. How do you not see that?
What could be it? More/less exposure to older, simplistic examples? Prior exposure to human art? Childhood head traumas? Or something else?
Well, they'll finally find out that no one wants to look at AI generated pictures or text. Once they do that, the tool will fail for the public and only work for the government.
I have found great success of getting rid of it by masking every 2nd pixel, regenerating missing pixels and then once again masking every 2nd pixel offset by 1.
Used an off the shelf model to fill in the pixels, but I also exported a depthmap first (before any alternations) and denoised it so generated masked pixels comform to the original content. The result was obviously not 100% perfect, but with more time and a model fine tuned for this specific use-case would be able to remove any kind of ai watermarking without too many issues.
It's certain now that most of the Western world has slid into fascism. Privacy and common decency advocates are all but lost.
I will say this, for everyone celebrating this as something that is "extremely beneficial to the cultural moment",
If I were an adversarial nation-state actor, I might be extremely interested in reverse engineering this and poisoning the well by applying it to real images.
Let's make the world impossible to understand.
If I take a screenshot of an AI image, will that then be seen as an AI image? Is that 'hidden in the image' or as metadata?
[1] https://github.com/wiltodelta/remove-ai-watermarks