Why? Don’t do this. Society is built on an implicit assumption of trust. You will erode the foundation that enables any success you might have in the short term.
Trust should be between people, not a person and some data.
So showing how easy to generate "false" data, this makes it more obvious for people focus on other people. Trusting people makes life much easier in my experience, while focusing on data, again in my experience, is a game of cat and mouse.
Sure, but how do you apply that to a society at large where powerful people are interested in making everybody distrust all reliable sources of information?
AI watermarks are no panacea, but at least they are a clear signal of what not to trust.
Only people with resources will be allowed to make content that is AI generated passed off as real.
Pandora's box is open. Instead of making a multi-tiered privileged society, we need to fundamentally restructure society to adapt.
Before that restructuring occurs it is critical to keep the playing field level. These are not tools that should be controlled by a minority authority, they are far too dangerous.
The only ones, then, who could afford to break the law are also the ones who make the law and own the law. Everyone else is subordinate in that model.
That's why technology like watermarking doesn't work and will never work. Implicitly it creates a minimum of a two-tiered society and no amount of "law" will change the technological reality of this.
Now the things they produce can be done in a fraction of the time without any of the stakes, nor any of the moral society-integrating foundational encoding.
Instead, a single billionaire with an army of GPUs can ask for a thing, and that thing will be produced near instantaneously.
The old way of regulating depended on PEOPLE creating things at PEOPLE speeds in order for the laws to work. That simply is not the case any more.
Isn't that the scenario the watermarks are useless against? Adversarial governments or anyone with enough money will be the ones who can generate images without watermarks even if you force them on the proles.
> AI watermarks are no panacea, but at least they are a clear signal of what not to trust.
Which seems like it only makes the actual problem worse? If most of them have watermarks, that only encourages people to put more trust in the ones that don't, even though those are the ones "powerful people" can still forge to manipulate everyone. What good is something that increases the credibility of adversarial government forgeries?
That being said, I’ll make a counter argument. To the extent that deep fakes need to be so wide spread that everyone becomes skeptical and there is no other way to trigger broad diligence then maybe there is a case to be made. But I am concerned that this will be worse than a more broadly trusted image environment
Poisons are widely available to everyone. People commonly have liters of them under their kitchen sink or in their garage. Many of them are also simple compounds that anyone can make, e.g. "cyanide" is just CN (carbon and nitrogen) typically attached to H, Na or K. Every one of those elements is required for human life, but combining them in specific ratios under well-known conditions creates a deadly poison. It's so simple to do that hobbyist chemists have to be careful not to create it by accident.
> But I am concerned that this will be worse than a more broadly trusted image environment
There are two different metrics of trust here.
The first is, should you trust an unauthenticated image you see on the internet? Now more than ever before, the answer to that question is no. Watermarks can't fix that because the people you least want to be trusting are the ones who can still forge images without any watermarks. You can't undo this by putting watermarks on other images.
The second is, do people trust random images from strangers on the internet? The ostensible purpose of doing watermarks is to get more people to do that. But when the answer to the first question is no, getting more people to do that is bad, because you're encouraging people to trust something that is not trustworthy.
What you want is for undetectable forgeries to be difficult/impossible in general, e.g. to have something that can tell anyone if an image is machine-generated regardless of whether the machine added a watermark. But watermarks don't give you that since they don't all add them or can feasibly be removed, and a generic algorithm that can detect even novel/unknown image generation methods may not even be possible.
“ Every one of those elements is required for human life, but combining them in specific ratios under well-known conditions creates a deadly poison. It's so simple to do that hobbyist chemists have to be careful not to create it by accident.”
You can’t, it’s an inherent contradiction. Human social structures have sophisticated and robust evolved mechanisms for establishing and maintaining trust. These dynamics are not one option among many, they are the optimum. By their definition they don’t scale to strangers around the planet. This is an immutable factor in why we have spam, bank fraud, etc. We want the benefits of trust without the cost of local constraints but wishing doesn’t make it so.
If I got a picture of my mom being held hostage it sure would be nice to have a watermark confirming in was an AI generated image. So again, why make this broadly an easily removable?
We now have the tools to increase trust in specific information, for example: by signing images that need high trust for things like news reporting using camera hardware root of trust with time and geo stamping. If signatures are removed, that's back to a default low-trust state.
That is how we ended up with the situation where "reputed" media organizations peddle daily lies or selective truths that are useful to their benefactors.
Making untraceable assets means parties can’t be held liable for harms.
Just because a bad actor might poison a toddler doesn’t mean you should sell them the arsenic.
Just because the effects of arsenic on the neurons of a brain are interesting means you should feed them to a toddler and watch the effects unfold.
I support the legal freedom to pursue any idea, but we should also mentor our colleagues about the consequences of our projects and avoid unnecessary harm.
Further, an ikea knife used in a crime can be traced back to the criminal through other evidence like finger prints, surveillance cameras, purchase receipts etc.
Arguments that have a emotional component, especially related to our evolutionary instinct to take care of kids has a way of avoiding the rationalizations people adopt to justify otherwise indefensible behavior.
You also dont do yourself any favors in a bad argument that lumps me in with some unknown group of people rather tan responding to my argument.
All watermarks are cures that are worse than the diseases they are trying to prevent (and never achieved to even cure anything).
Watermark is a blatant violation of legitimate privacy expectations, while not preventing anything because they can be easily removed.
So all the honest usages are punished, while illegitimate ones are not caught.
I am with you on opposing a watermark that identifies a person.
I am not with you in saying all watermarks are a violation of privacy or that they result in punishment of honest use. I don’t see how those follow.
It's too late already. We live in a post-trust society now.
Preserving the illusion that that assumption is still useful only helps the people who are exploiting it.
That said, this tool is incredibly lossy, garbling text, completely changing shapes. It also fails to remove the new gemini spark / placement that moved since yesterday.
would you say the same thing about a ROT13 breaker, or would you recognize how laughably naive that sounds?
AI generated images have never existed before, they will break our ability to use the digital tools we have built society on if we let them. Ensuring they can be identified and have attribution tracing data embedded is a reasonable step to prevent abuse.
I know of at least one music GenAI service whose ToS forbid me from using their productions in ways that are incompatible with my local rights. If Google decides, as they did with YouTube, that they'll enforce this company's watermark even though I have a right to use their results then I've passively accepted that a (foreign) company decides which of my legal rights I can exercise.
For a more pessimistic outlook: for the GenAI companies that work for the military, are those pictures also watermarked? Because if watermarks only apply to one group then the "implicit trust" argument doesn't work.
I'm in favor of watermarking the same way I am in favor of paying artists for their work. But just as with youtube-dl and DVD decryption libraries, tools like these are necessary to level the playing field.
It’s kind like if I took a picture off of your facebook with your keychain, and used it to make a copy of your house key. You’d probably prefer I reached out and told you to take down the picture instead of creating a template of the key for anyone to download and make a copy along with your home address.