Hacker News Reader

Comment by red_admiral | Hacker News Reader

> every image you create

*with the help of AI*. Does in fact make a difference.

While it does make a difference, their willingness to quietly integrate watermarking features into what people saw as simple apps for doing simple tasks is unnerving. It only takes a small change for them to start baking your identifiable information into all images they edit, or some government politely asking them to do that.

I wonder if in ten years we'll have a horrifying world where everything that leaves a machine is imprinted with its permanent identifier. Every file comes with a verifiable history of who created it, what computers it passed through, who made edits. We're closer to that world than we think.

There is a certain convergence of wills here: watermarking AI products on the one hand, and infusing AI into everything on the other hand. When you layer generative AI into Notepad, once just a raw text buffer, then you’re setting the stage for watermarking everything because AI touches everything.

AI watermarking is now the law.

Imagine the horrifying world where nothing is - and a so-called AI is thereby free to impersonate anyone.

We already live in that world, and the sky hasn't fallen so far. Even in the worst case scenario, the world isn't going to be as horrifying as the alternative, because people react to the proliferation of scams, they will not keep falling for fake impersonation for the 10000th time a row. In this scenario, we simply will stop taking factual-looking images at their word in the same way how you don't take any piece of writing on the internet as factual, verifiable truth. Journalism will rely on a person vouching for their images with their reputation, and images with unknown sources will be looked at with suspicion.

I am not willing to pay the price of sending every bit I create to some megacorporation's server or stamp it with my only identity so the computer can tell me what's AI and what isn't. Especially not while the average quality settles into an uncanny valley that's often discernible with the naked eye, both for text and images.

> Journalism will rely on a person vouching for their images with their reputation

Their images? I don't know how they'll be able to prove that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com