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SynthID: A tool to watermark and identify content generated through AI

deepmind.google

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Re: SynthID: A tool to watermark and identify content generated through AI

#32

Post by raincole »

parliament32 wrote: post #30

Note that watermarking (yes, including text) is a requirement[1] of the EU AI Act, and goes into effect in August 2026, so I suspect we'll see a lot more work in this space in the near future. [1] Specifically, "...synthetic audio, image, video or text content, shall ensure that the outputs of the AI system are marked in a machine-readable format and detectable as artificially generated or manipulated", see https://a…

EU really like unenforceable regulations, doesn't it?

Re: SynthID: A tool to watermark and identify content generated through AI

#34

Post by alibero »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #4

I wonder how it stands up to feature analysis. "Generate a pure white image." "Generate a pure black image." Channel diff, extract steganographic signature for analysis.

I've been looking into this. There seems to be some mostly-repeating 2D pattern in the LSB of the generated images. The magnitude of the noise seems to be larger in the pure black image vs pure white image. My main goal is to doctor a real image to flag as positive for SynthID, but I imagine if you smoothed out the LSB, you might be able to make images (especially very bright images) no longer flag as SynthID? Of course, it's possible there's also noise in here from the image-generation process...

Gemini really doesn't like generating pure-white images but you can ask it to generate a "photograph of a pure-white image with a black border" and then crop it. So far I've just been looking at pure images and gradients, it's possible that more complex images have SynthID embedded in a more complicated way (e.g. a specific pattern in an embedding space).

Re: SynthID: A tool to watermark and identify content generated through AI

#38

Post by elpocko »

u1hcw9nx wrote: post #2

This technology could be used to copyrights as well. >The watermark doesn’t change the image or video quality. It’s added the moment content is created, and designed to stand up to modifications like cropping, adding filters, changing frame rates, or lossy compression. But does it survive if you use another generative image model to replicate the image?

It doesn't. I don't have a link for you right now but there was a post on reddit recently showing that SynthID is removed from images by passing the image through a diffusion model for a single step at low denoise. The output image is identical to the input image (to the human eye).

Re: SynthID: A tool to watermark and identify content generated through AI

#39

Post by ks2048 »

How about a database of verified non-AI images?

I'm thinking of historical images, where there aren't a huge number of existing images and no more will ever be created.

If I see something labeled "Street scene in Paris, 1905". I want to know if it is legit.

Re: SynthID: A tool to watermark and identify content generated through AI

#40

Post by hansihe »

raincole wrote: post #32
parliament32 wrote: post #30

Note that watermarking (yes, including text) is a requirement[1] of the EU AI Act, and goes into effect in August 2026, so I suspect we'll see a lot more work in this space in the near future. [1] Specifically, "...synthetic audio, image, video or text content, shall ensure that the outputs of the AI system are marked in a machine-readable format and detectable as artificially generated or manipulated", see https://a…

EU really like unenforceable regulations, doesn't it?

What do you mean? There is nothing unenforceable about this.
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