Reverse engineering Gemini's SynthID detection
1–10 of 66 posts
Re: Reverse engineering Gemini's SynthID detection
#2> We're actively collecting pure black and pure white images generated by Nano Banana Pro to improve multi-resolution watermark extraction.
Oh hey, neat. I mentioned this specific method of extracting SynthID a while back.[1]
Glad to see someone take it up.
Re: Reverse engineering Gemini's SynthID detection
#3It says not to use these tools to misrepresent AI-generated content as human-created. But the project is a watermark removal tool with a pip-installable CLI and strength settings named "aggressive" and "maximum." Calling this research while shipping turnkey watermark stripping is trying to have it both ways in a way that's uncomfortable to read.
The README itself reads like unedited AI output with several layers of history baked in.
- V1 and V2 appear in tables and diagrams but are never explained. V3 gets a pipeline diagram that hand-waves its fallback path.
- The same information is restated three times across Overview, Architecture, and Technical Deep Dive. ~1600 words padded to feel like a paper without the rigor.
- Five badges, 4 made up, for a project with 88 test images, no CI, and no test suite. "Detection Rate: 90%" has no methodology behind it. "License: Research" links nowhere and isn't a license.
- No before/after images, anywhere, for a project whose core claim is imperceptible modification.
- Code examples use two different import styles. One will throw an ImportError.
- No versioning. If Google changes SynthID tomorrow, nothing tells you the codebook is stale.
The underlying observations about resolution-dependent carriers and cross-image phase consistency are interesting. The packaging undermines them.
Re: Reverse engineering Gemini's SynthID detection
#4> We're actively collecting pure black and pure white images generated by Nano Banana Pro to improve multi-resolution watermark extraction. Oh hey, neat. I mentioned this specific method of extracting SynthID a while back.[1] Glad to see someone take it up. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47169146#47169767
FWIW, I had Nano Banana create pure white/black images in February, and there was no recognizable watermark in them (all pixels really were #ffffff / #000000 IIRC).
Meta: your comment was marked [dead], like a few other constructive comments I saw in recent days. Not sure why.
Re: Reverse engineering Gemini's SynthID detection
#5[deleted]
Re: Reverse engineering Gemini's SynthID detection
#6if you downscale then upscale it removes the watermark
Re: Reverse engineering Gemini's SynthID detection
#7kinda ironic you can clearly see signs of Claude, as it shows misaligning table walls in the readme doc
Re: Reverse engineering Gemini's SynthID detection
#8It says not to use these tools to misrepresent AI-generated content as human-created. But the project is a watermark removal tool with a pip-installable CLI and strength settings named "aggressive" and "maximum." Calling this research while shipping turnkey watermark stripping is trying to have it both ways in a way that's uncomfortable to read. The README itself reads like unedited AI output with several layers of h…
Agreed. This isn't punk this just helps the bad guys. Society needs to know what content is AI generated and what is not.
Re: Reverse engineering Gemini's SynthID detection
#9It says not to use these tools to misrepresent AI-generated content as human-created. But the project is a watermark removal tool with a pip-installable CLI and strength settings named "aggressive" and "maximum." Calling this research while shipping turnkey watermark stripping is trying to have it both ways in a way that's uncomfortable to read. The README itself reads like unedited AI output with several layers of h…
Agreed. This isn't punk this just helps the bad guys. Society needs to know what content is AI generated and what is not.
If that's the case, society will inevitably be disappointed.
There are already ten million AI image generators, the overwhelming majority of which do not watermark their outputs. Google auto-inserting them is nice, but ultimately this kind of tool to remove them will inevitably be widespread.
Re: Reverse engineering Gemini's SynthID detection
#10Ok i get that eventually someone was gonna do this but why would we want to purposely remove one of the only ways of detecting if an image is ai generated or not...?