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Comment by pdntspa | Hacker News Reader

And, once again, people seek to add additional, unnecessary steps and abstractions to perfectly fine processes, because of contrived bullshit ("copyright!")

Stop abstracting input away from output. Attribution here is a fools errand built on overbearing, unjust, and misinterpreted concerns over copyright, the relevance of which have yet to be proven in a legal sense. This is going to give The Man yet another way to suppress actors they don't like.

Repeat it with me, folks: YOU CANNOT CONTROL THAT WHICH HAS BEEN RELEASED TO THE PUBLIC. If you do not want things (people/their agents) to perceive your works, then keep them private.

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On the contrary — copyrighted data industry(?) is quickly converging into copyright by appearance and not by provenance or by means. The dataset problem is kind of forgiven, but regurgitation problem continues to exist.

I think copyright as understood in IT is a bit of marsupials, that copyright is considered a property inherited by exact copies and intentional reconstructions. The criteria used in the real world is similar, but slightly different.

Also, this is going to be tone policing, but raging don’t make you right. If anything, it’ll do opposite of that.

> On the contrary — copyrighted data industry(?) is quickly converging into copyright by appearance and not by provenance or by means.

I mean, its always kind of been that way. You can copyright the appearence not the idea. Provenance doesn't really matter.

I don't care about copyright one iota, but this may be useful in distinguishing fake images from real photos.

People generating fake photos will just use an AI that doesn't leave a watermark. We are quickly approaching the point at which AI-generated and real images just cannot be distinguished, and we're going to have to adapt to that.

The other perspective is traceable cameras, such that you can have some guarantee that an image came from a particular device and wasn't AI-generated (e.g. your camera signs each image after capture).

There have been attempts to cryptographically sign images, which have largely been broken, but the principle is there: https://www.dpreview.com/opinion/9955873926/why-cryptographi...

See https://contentauthenticity.org/how-it-works

If the plan is to trust every phone and camera manufacturer to keep their key safe then the plan is stupid.

If the plan is to have a few trusted manufacturers for CCTV and police cameras than that might work, but will do little to combat misinformation.

There's value is raising the bar of difficulty, even if you don't make it completely impossible.

I see a future where training a model without a watermark is illegal.

>We are quickly approaching the point at which AI-generated and real images just cannot be distinguished

Eh, there are so many ways where a large photo can fail. I'm obsessed with AI Art, but I think there will be human(or AI) detectors that will be paid to determine validity.

Or just use a watermark removing AI.

> we're going to have to adapt to that.

I don't see how we can without great harm. The only adaptation that I can see is to stop trusting in anything at all, and we're already dangerously far down that road as it is.

Yeah, a zero-trust society totally won't catastrophically implode, trust me bro.

Not in general. You can't detect this watermark without access to the original model (the paper authors bill this as a feature). So the model owner could do that test to check if their particular model produced some image, but a third party trying to work out whether a given image was fake (a) would not have the data they need, and (b) even if they did, would need to repeat the test for every possible image generating model in existence.

All photos are edited in their taking. As such, all images represent a "fake" reality. The only difference between an AI "fake" image and photograph is the camera.

That's a lonely hill to die on..

No, it's a point people forget. Even 20 years ago people were asking "is this photo photoshopped?", but if you're viewing it on a webpage, it has absolutely been photoshopped. The problem is we aren't good at specifying what we mean by "photoshopped". Any photo you view has been digitally altered, getting more specific gets into the alterer's intent which gets really messy really quick.

What difference does it make if it was digitally altered or in an analogue fashion? A slightly longer exposure is also not showing reality as seen by human eyes. Besides, there is no single reality even among humans.

It's a rather extreme view but there is a lot that can be done with photography that can be very misleading. If you see a photo that seems incredible, it might be. People's general skepticism of photos is too low, AI might bring that skepticism a bit higher which I think would be a good thing.

You can think of a photo like a news article, the author can be completely truthful while omitting certain facts to give a false impression. The same can be done with how a photo is framed, cropped and processed.

The intent of a photographer can definitely be translated into the photograph or it wouldn't be an artform.

<< As such, all images represent a "fake" reality.

Parent may not be expressing it right, but he does have a point. There is a level of 'interpretation' that is being done during the taking of a picture. If you add to this recent attempts to incorporate AI into picture taking to add/remove parts thereof all of a sudden parent's proposition does not sound so far fetched.

Granted, it is still a different level than just generating an image from a prompt, but I would not dismiss the thought outright.

There's a difference between what happens when you point a regular digital camera at the moon and take a photo and what happens when you do that with a Samsung Space Zoom phone. Most people believe that difference is an important one.

If “sight” is perceptually completed in the visual cortex, then everything we see is “fake”. - Mr. Magoo

The actual question to ask isn't "is this fake?" it's "how is this record likely to have been manipulated or constructed and whom does it serve?"

Calm down. It’s a research paper. Ideas are not dangerous.

I see responses expressing disbelief, but think I agree with you. There's a quote whose source I can't find, but paraphrasing, is "there is no idea so dangerous it cannot be considered."

Belief in an idea can be dangerous, because of the actions it may lead to. But the mere reflection, consideration, or phrasing of an idea is not evil; cannot be evil.

> Ideas are not dangerous.

Wow.

this surely deserves an /s

right?

Like, you forgot the /s or are new to the internet and assumed people saw the sarcasm?

I'm completely serious. It pains me to have to spell it out: a metaphysical entity cannot do physical harm. The wrong idea in the hands of the wrong person, sure, that can be a dangerous combination. Does that mean we should ban ideas? Of course not.

> If you do not want things (people/their agents) to perceive your works, then keep them private.

That's the problem that copyright is intended to address. Without it, too many people do exactly that and society suffers.

Modern copyright is insufferable and desperately needs fixing. But the concept exists in order to address a different real problem. Without copyright, we still need a solution to that problem.

Does it though? With the sheer volume of creatives nowadays, combined with industry that seems to love nothing more than whoring itself out for maximum accessibility/customer base/sales, we live in a world where creative people create for the sheer sake and joy of creating. I would like to think that many of these folks would still create should copyright not have existed. Maybe in the old world, where something as simple as literacy was at a premium, but in this new world? I'd bet the lack of copyright would filter out so much mediocrity and lowest-common-denominator filth

You might be right, but I'm dubious.

> but in this new world?

This "new world" isn't actually all that new, though. I guess depending on when you count it as starting -- you brought up literacy being a premium in the "old world", which was largely a very long time ago, before the concept of copyright existed.

It won't even work for copyright, that is a legal process not a technical one, for which rights and limitations exists independently of the medium.

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