this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023

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Google debuts a new way to watermark AI-generated images (www.axios.com)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

15 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Google's DeepMind unit is unveiling today a new method it says can invisibly and permanently label images that have been generated by artificial intelligence.

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Why it matters: It's become increasingly hard for people to distinguish between images made by humans and those generated by AI programs. Google and other tech giants have pledged to develop technical means to do so.

You don't need a watermark for good intentions. A bad actor doesn't put a watermark on it. A watermark may hurt because the broad mass will think "if there's no watermark, the image is real".

[+] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

You heard of stable difusion? They got 1 line installs nowadays then all you have to enter is a prompt and go.

Entirely open source so anyone could improve the model or not, and it'd be more than legal to release a non watermarked version (if a watermarked version even ever appeared).

I saw down the chain it was compared to deuvono, which I'd argue is a bad analogy - cause whos gonna run a rootkit on their PC just to create an image, especially when there's a million options not to (unlike games which are generally unique)

[+] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I see what you mean yes, but of course such large resources are required to train the model - not run it. So reasonably as long as a bunch of users can pool resources to compete with big tech, there will always be an 'un-watermark-able' crowd out there, making all the watermakrs essentially useless because they only got half the picture.

And how training these models works is insanely parallel, so reasonably - if (ideally a FOSS) project pops up allowing users to donate cpu time to train the model as a whole - users could actually have more computational power than the big tech companies

[+] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I think youre mixing together a couple angles here to try n make a point.

'Unless the open source model is the best...theyre using proprietary code' youre talking about a hypothetical program hypothetically being stolen and referencing it as a definite?

As per the companies, of course they only use certain resoures, theyre companies they need returns to exist. A couple million down the drain could be some CEO's next bonus, so they won't do anything theyre into sure they'll get something from (even if only short term)

As per the 4chan, was that a coincidence or are you referencing unstable diffusion? Cause they did do almost exactly that (before of course it got mismanaged cause the nsfw industry is always been a bit ghetto)

And like sure fold it at home or donate for aws, same end result really doesn't matter what the user's are comfortable with

And whew finally sure ms bought github but like you think stable diffusion bought the internet? Courts have proven webscraping is legal...

Ik this is a wall of text but like I said these arguments all feel like a bunch of thoughts tangentially related

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This is Google were talking about. We're probably going to find out that you can remove the mark by resizing or reducing the color depth or something stupid like that. Remember how YouTube added ContentID and it would flag innocent users while giving actual pirates a pass? As said in a related article:

"There are few or no watermarks that have proven robust over time," said Ben Zhao, professor at the University of Chicago studying AI authentication. "An attacker seeking to promote deepfake imagery as real, or discredit a real photo as fake, will have a lot to gain, and will not stop at cropping, or lossy compression or changing colors."

https://www.maginative.com/article/google-deepmind-launches-new-tool-to-label-ai-generated-images/

[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

TBF, I don't think the purpose of this watermark is to prevent bad people for passing AI as real. It would be a welcome side-effect but that's not why google wants this. Ultimately this is supposed to prevent AI training data from being contaminated with other AI generated content. You could imagine if the data set for training contains a million images generated with previous models having mangled fingers and crooked eyes, it would be hard to train a good AI out of that. Garbage in, garbage out.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 years ago (1 children)

So theoretically, those of us who put original images online could add this invisible watermark to make AI models leave our stuff out of their "steal this" pile?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

Yea actually, that has a good "taste your own medecine" vibe

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

AI-generated images are becoming increasingly realistic, AI can't tell them apart anymore.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago

iirc AI models becoming worse after being trained with AI generated data is an actual issue right now. Even if we (or the AI) can't distinguish them from real images there are subtle differences that can be compounded into quite large differences if the AI is fed its own work over several generations and lead to a degraded output.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

I’m not sure that’s the case. For instance, a lot of smaller local models leverage GPT4 to generate synthetic training data, which drastically improves the model’s output quality. The issue comes in when there is no QC on the model’s output. The same applies to Stable Diffusion.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

Spoiler - they will secretly have all humans in ai generated art have slightly messed up hands.

Mind blown!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

says so in article:

The watermark is part of a larger effort by Google and other tech giants to develop ways to verify the authenticity of AI-generated images.

This is important because AI-generated images are becoming increasingly realistic, and it can be difficult to tell them apart from real images.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Its invisibility should really help all the laypeople see it clearly.