OpenAI Adopts Google's SynthID Watermark for AI Images with Verification Tool

Of course if you need to regenerate the image with an unwatermarked image-generation model to remove it, it more or less still serves its purpose.

https://github.com/swesterfeld/audiowmark

You can stuff per-item database unique IDs, user IDs, geohashes, and other nefarious things inside.

We need to protest this LOUDLY.

Our devices are being locked down, we're having attestation and trusted computing forced on us, the internet all over the world is undergoing age verification with full ID verification.

Just because this is on "ai images" today doesn't mean it won't be on all images - screenshots, your camera reel, etc. - in the fullness of time.

This is scary.

These are the tools of 1984. They've been boiling the water slowly, but in the last year things have really started to pick up pace. Please push back. Loudly.

Everyone at Google and OpenAI working on this: WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING. STOP.

We have laws and mechanisms to prevent revenge porn, CSAM, defamation, etc. They are robust and can be made even stronger. We do not need to sacrifice the security of our privacy and our speech to fight imagined harms when the real danger is turning into an authoritarian society.

If this actually works solidly, Google is in deep, deep, deep shit. It would mean that I can put a mark on my non-AI videos and demand that Google not allow upload of my identifiably copyrighted content.

This would completely obliterate YouTube.

Its a tool with different modalties and affordances.

ie. you would fail too.

Most people put so little effort into prompting them that they come out statistically "average" which makes them blatantly ugly.

Most of them are pretty bad just like 90% of everything is bad. Humans create bad art all day long too.

I gave a specific example of a making a texture for a videogame? How does that change what you actually said to me very specifically despite maybe not reading what I said?

To the extent that I'm upset its at peoples capitulation at this DRM nonsense over being overly reactive to ... internet images which dont matter.

So that you don't have to address any of the issues?

So weird images are a big problem? No they don't matter at all.

I have an IP address so therefore this is all fine?

"Every accusation is a confession" also seems like an insinuation that I have something to hide but you have "nothing to hide, nothing to fear"ie the very generic privacy right fallacy.

As for "vibes driven"... this whole technical "fix" is a result of the reactionary "vibe" of the ai moral panic, your "notes" don't seem to be providing any perspective there?

https://github.com/wiltodelta/remove-ai-watermarks

Set up as a ComfyUI workflow that does a few things: it tries SDXL, Flux, and a couple of different denoising methods at the lowest possible strength (progressively incrementing) to avoid changing the image too much, while also running a SynthID check each time, and repeating this in a loop until the watermark is essentially gone.

At the same time, you’d probably want to add some kind of threshold based on a perceptual hash aka the maximum perceptual quality difference you’re willing to accept.

Writing a more detailed description does not make the models stick to it more.

Never released it, but it was obvious to most people in the SD community that denoising using a diffusion model was a relatively trivial means to beat most steganographic watermarks.

Don't sell yourself short. I'm sure it was only hundreds of thousands.

In my tests the image looks clearly distinct. In other words, if you can tell the difference then it isn’t a good test.

This is antithetical to freedom and privacy.

There should be no way for anyone to track down who posted a political meme, anti-religious message, or any other legally protected speech. This will come back to bite us in the ass if we keep building it.

Soon every image or communication we make will be watermarked if we continue to let this shit seep into the commons. Everything from your phone photos, to your screenshots, to your social media posts.

One day soon Republicans or Democrats or whoever doesn't like your freedoms will use this tech to identify you and control you.

There are laws for harms - CSAM, revenge porn, etc. Social media platforms can identify, ban, and report abusers. The framework of the law can take care of the rest.

Our digital footprint should not be tracked and barcoded.

I.e. it doesn't make sense for a purely white or black image, but as you gradually add colors or features, at some point they would want to add a watermark, but based on what? It's an interesting question.