They are not spymarks if they don't encode any personal IDs and are merely used to indicate that an image was AI-generated. I don't think Google or OpenAI use SynthID to include personal data.
Why? I assume by default that it's uniquely identifiable, because it just makes practical sense for OAI and Google (tracking misuse at the very least, but also data), it's trivial to implement and trivial to hide or plausibly deny.
The spying and tracking started pretty quickly though and they've repeatedly demonstrated that they can't be trusted. They've even violated the law on several occasions in efforts to collect data they had no right to.
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." - Eric Schmidt CEO of Google
- Google. The canonical “don’t be evil” meme origin.
- Meta. Adjacent “they trust me, dumb fucks” meme origin.
- Apple. Least of all, but still fits: PR pushes double on privacy, but their interests are not their end-users, they just happen to align on some points as they’re not in adtech business.
- Microsoft. The classic case for getting slaps on the wrist, Gates said one thing he’d do differently is sending lobbyists earlier, or something to that effect, didn’t he?
- Amazon, Netflix, Uber, Airbnb and many more are still all variants of the same story. It’s not a lie that everyone nowadays expects most megacorps to fuck people over if there’s money in that.
That’s the Order of “Feel for It Again”, with oak leaf clusters already, no? Something’s cursed in this industry, every company that sells software to individual people ends up the same when they become gigantic and endowed by wealth and power, even if they were decent in their early days. They all become those blind heralds of paperclip^W shareholder value(tm) maximizers, and I’m finding myself struggling looking for an exception.
Am I to believe this time it’s going to be any different, to set those - not baseless, I’d say - cynical expectations aside? Any signs there’s a change?
So, I disagree - it’s obvious, given the ad-adjacent end-user-facing megacorp context, OpenAI is right there. Cynical - sadly so, yes. But I’m sure it’s obvious: the idea of such a possible direction comes up pretty quickly and reliably so.
Do you think that matters to Google? They've been fined repeatedly for violating GDPR already. It's like multiple violations and fines every single year going back to 2019. They don't care about breaking the law if it gets them what they want. They've been found guilty of breaking the law in multiple countries, including the US. They've easily been able to afford every fine and still come out massively profitable. Google is above the law and they know it.