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Comment by akersten | Hacker News Reader

Some days it feels like I'm the only hacker left who doesn't want government mandated watermarking in creative tools. Were politicians 20 years ago as overreative they'd have demanded Photoshop leave a trace on anything it edited. The amount of moral panic is off the charts. It's still a computer, and we still shouldn't trust everything we see. The fundamentals haven't changed.

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> It's still a computer, and we still shouldn't trust everything we see. The fundamentals haven't changed.

I think that by now it should be crystal clear to everyone that it matters a lot the sheer scale a new technology permits for $nefarious_intent.

Knives (under a certain size) are not regulated. Guns are regulated in most countries. Atomic bombs are definitely regulated. They can all kill people if used badly, though.

When a photo was faked/composed with old tech, it was relatively easy to spot. With photoshop, it became more complicated to spot it but at the same time it wasn't easy to mass-produce altered images. Large models are changing the rules here as well.

> Knives (under a certain size) are not regulated. Guns are regulated in most countries. Atomic bombs are definitely regulated

I don’t think this is a good comparison: knives are easy to produce, guns a bit harder, atomic bombs definitely harder. You should find something that is as easy to produce as a knife, but regulated.

The "product" to be regulated here is the LLM/model itself, not its output.

Or, if you see the altered photo as the "product", then the "product" of the knife/gun/bomb is the damage it creates to a human body.

>You should find something that is as easy to produce as a knife, but regulated.

The DEA and ATF have entered the chat

They can leave, plain water fits this bill.

I think we're overreacting. Digital fakes will proliferate, and we'll freak out bc it's new. But after a certain amount of time, we'll just get used to it and realize that the world goes on, and whatever major adverse effects actually aren't that difficult to deal with. Which is not the case with nuclear proliferation or things like that.

The story of human history is newer generations freaking about progress and novel changes that have never been seen before. And later generations being perfectly okay with it and adapting to a new style of life.

In general I concur but the adaptation doesn't come out of the blue or just only because people get used to it but also because countermeasures are taken, regulations are written and adjustments are made to reduce the negative impact. Also the hyperconnected society is still relatively new and I'm not sure we have adapted for it yet.

Photography and motion pictures were deemed evil. Video games made you a mass murderer. Barcodes somehow seem to affect your health or the freshness of vegetables. The earth is flat.

The issue is that some people believe shit someone tells them and they deny any facts. This has been always a problem. I am all in for labeling content as AI generated. But it wont help with people trying to be malicious or who choose to be dumb. Forcing to watermark every picture made neither, it will turn into a massive problem, its a solid pillar towards full scale surveillance. Just alone the fact that analog cams become by default less trustworthy then any digital device with watermarking is terrible. Even worse, phones will eventually have AI upscaling and similar by default, you can't even make an accurate picture without anything being tagged AI. The information is eventually worthless.

It shouldn’t be that we panic about it and regulate the hell out.

We could use the opportunity to deploy robust systems of verification and validation to all digital works. One that allows for proving authenticity while respecting privacy if desired. For example… it’s insane in the US we revolve around a paper social security number that we know damn well isn’t unique. Or that it’s a massive pain in the ass for most people to even check the hash of a download.

Guess which we’ll do!

I think the long term effect will be that photos and videos no longer have any evidentiary value legally or socially, absent a trusted chain of custody.

Yes exactly. And this is kind of already played out with text. The printing press came out, literacy increased. Suddenly anyone could write anything and sign anybody else's name to it. There was a trust crisis. Nowadays, we've just gotten used to it and we look at where text came from instead of just what text says.

For example, I'd rather read a tweet from Paul Graham's account than read a screenshot of a Paul Graham tweet that a stranger emailed to me. In the latter case, the source makes me suspicious, so then I go to a more trusted source, e.g. a reputable news organization, or PG's actually X account.

instead of making everyone watermark the AI, we should have cameras that take and sign pictures securely. requires hardware!

https://petapixel.com/2024/01/02/cameras-content-authenticit...

seems like a better way

> a new technology permits for $nefarious_intent

But people with actual nefarious intent will easily be able to remove these watermarks, however they're implemented. This is copy protection and key escrow all over again - it hurts honest people and doesn't even slow down bad people.

Politicians absolutely were doing this 20-30 years ago. Plenty of folks here are old enough to remember debates on Slashdot around the Communications Decency Act, Child Online Protection Act, Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, Children's Internet Protection Act, et al.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Decency_Act

It’s annoying how effective “for the children” is. That peiole really just turn off their brains for that.

Nobody is doing it just "for the children" - that's just a fig-leaf justification for doing what many people want anyway: surveillance, tracking, and censorship (of other people, of course - just the bad ones doing/saying bad things).

IOW - People aren't turning off their brains about "for the children" - they just want it anyway and don't think any further than that.

Easy to say until it impacts you in a bad way:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/ai-generated-evidence...

> “My wife and I have been together for over 30 years, and she has my voice everywhere,” Schlegel said. “She could easily clone my voice on free or inexpensive software to create a threatening message that sounds like it’s from me and walk into any courthouse around the country with that recording.”

> “The judge will sign that restraining order. They will sign every single time,” said Schlegel, referring to the hypothetical recording. “So you lose your cat, dog, guns, house, you lose everything.”

At the moment, the only alternative is courts simply never accept photo/video/audio as evidence. I know if I were a juror I wouldn't.

At the same time, yeah, watermarks won't work. Sure, Google can add a watermark/fingerprint that is impossible to remove, but there will be tools that won't put such watermarks/fingerprints.

Testimony is evidence. I don't think most cases have any physical evidence.

A lot of cases rely heavily on security camera footage.

I suspect watermarking ends up being a net negative, as people learn to trust that lack of a watermark indicates authenticity. Propaganda won’t have the watermark.

In the past, and maybe even to this very day - all color printers print hidden watermarks in faint yellow ink to assist with forensic identification of anything printed. Even for things printed in B&W (on a color printer).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots

Yes, can we not jump on the surveillance/tracking/censorship bandwagon please?

Unless they've recently changed it, Photoshop will actually refuse to open or edit images of at least US banknotes.

You do know that every color copier comes with the ability to identify US currency and would refuse to copy it? And that every color printer leaves a pattern of faint yellow dots on every printout that uniquely identifies the printer?

And that's not a good thing.

I'm just responding to this by OP:

> Were politicians 20 years ago as overreative they'd have demanded Photoshop leave a trace on anything it edited.

Why not? Like, genuinely.

I generally don't think that's it's good or just for a government to collude with manufacturers to track/trace it's citizens without consent or notice. And even if notice was given, I'd still be against it

The arguments put forward by people generally I don't find compelling -- for example, in this thread around protecting against counterfeit.

The "force" applied to address these concerns is totally out of proportion. Whenever these discussions happen, I feel like they descend into a general viewpoint, "if we could technically solve any possible crime, we should do everything in our power to solve it."

I'm against this viewpoint, and acknowledge that that means _some crime_ occurs. That's acceptable to me. I don't feel that society is correctly structured to "treat" crime appropriately, and technology has outpaced our ability to holistically address it.

Generally, I don't see (speaking for the US) the highest incarceration rate in the world to be a good thing, or being generally effective, and I don't believe that increasing that number will change outcomes.

Gotcha, thanks for the explanation. I think that personally, I agree with your stance that it's a bad kind of thing for government to do, but in practice I find that I'm in favor of the effects of this specific law. (Perhaps I need to do some thinking.)

It depends on how you're looking at it. For the people not getting handed counterfeit currency, it's probably a good thing.

Also probably good for the people trying to counterfeit money with a printer, better not to end up in jail for that.

Nope, having a stable, trusted currency trumps whatever productive use one could have for a anonymous, currency reproducing color printer

Is this something strictly with the US currency notes or is the same true for other countries currency as well?

It's most notes, and for EU and US notes (as well as some others), it's based on a certain pattern on the bills: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation

Of course, countries with plastic currency notes (like Australia) don't have to worry about this because their notes incorporate hard-to-counterfeit features like transparent windows.

Try photocopying some US dollar bills.

HN is full of authoritarian bootlickers who can't imagine that people can exist without a paternalistic force to keep them from doing bad things.

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