Reverse engineering Gemini's SynthID detection • Hacker News Board

Re: Reverse engineering Gemini's SynthID detection

#21

Post by raincole » Thu, Apr 09, 2026, 9:54 PM UTC

sodacanner wrote: post #19

I don't understand all the handwringing. If it's this easy to remove SynthID from an AI-generated image then it wasn't a good solution in the first place.

There is no solution. I don't know why people discuss this subject as if there is a technical solution. As if there are fairies or souls hidden in the pixels that help us tell what is AI generated and what is not.

Re: Reverse engineering Gemini's SynthID detection

#22

Post by TacticalCoder » Thu, Apr 09, 2026, 9:58 PM UTC

armanj wrote: post #7

kinda ironic you can clearly see signs of Claude, as it shows misaligning table walls in the readme doc

> kinda ironic you can clearly see signs of Claude, as it shows misaligning table walls in the readme doc

This one is such a gigantic clusterfuck... They're mimicking ASCII tables using Unicode chars of varying length and, at times, there's also an off-by-one error. But the model (not Claude, but the model underneath it) is capable of generating ASCII tables.

P.S: I saw the future... The year is 2037 and we've got Unicode tables still not properly aligned.

Re: Reverse engineering Gemini's SynthID detection

#23

Post by sodacanner » Thu, Apr 09, 2026, 9:58 PM UTC

raincole wrote: post #21

sodacanner wrote: post #19

I don't understand all the handwringing. If it's this easy to remove SynthID from an AI-generated image then it wasn't a good solution in the first place.

There is no solution . I don't know why people discuss this subject as if there is a technical solution. As if there are fairies or souls hidden in the pixels that help us tell what is AI generated and what is not.

Sure, and things like this help drive home that SynthID wasn't a solution at all.

Re: Reverse engineering Gemini's SynthID detection

#24

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 09, 2026, 9:59 PM UTC

refulgentis wrote: post #3

It 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…

[deleted]

Re: Reverse engineering Gemini's SynthID detection

#25

Post by DonsDiscountGas » Thu, Apr 09, 2026, 10:05 PM UTC

raincole wrote: post #21

sodacanner wrote: post #19

I don't understand all the handwringing. If it's this easy to remove SynthID from an AI-generated image then it wasn't a good solution in the first place.

There is no solution . I don't know why people discuss this subject as if there is a technical solution. As if there are fairies or souls hidden in the pixels that help us tell what is AI generated and what is not.

If you want to make an AI generated image but don't want other people to know that it's AI, the most obvious solution is to not use Gemini. Synth ID is watermarking. It's only ever going to be useful to good actors, who want an AI generated image and aren't trying to hide the fact that it's AI generated.

Re: Reverse engineering Gemini's SynthID detection

#26

Post by dgellow » Thu, Apr 09, 2026, 10:09 PM UTC

armanj wrote: post #7

kinda ironic you can clearly see signs of Claude, as it shows misaligning table walls in the readme doc

I mean, just reading the readme content it is pretty obvious it is Claude

Re: Reverse engineering Gemini's SynthID detection

#27

Post by doctorpangloss » Thu, Apr 09, 2026, 10:09 PM UTC

Okay... this tests its own ability to remove the watermark against its own detector. It doesn't test against Gemini's SynthID app. So it does nothing...

Re: Reverse engineering Gemini's SynthID detection

#28

Post by huflungdung » Thu, Apr 09, 2026, 10:10 PM UTC

armanj wrote: post #7

kinda ironic you can clearly see signs of Claude, as it shows misaligning table walls in the readme doc

[dead]

Re: Reverse engineering Gemini's SynthID detection

#29

Post by Tiberium » Thu, Apr 09, 2026, 10:14 PM UTC

Seems like a very low-quality AI-assisted research repo, and it doesn't even properly test against Google's own SynthID detector. It's not hard at all (with some LLM assistance, for example) to reverse-engineer network requests to be able to do SynthID detection without a browser instance or Gemini access, and then you'd have a ground truth.

Re: Reverse engineering Gemini's SynthID detection

#30

Post by levocardia » Thu, Apr 09, 2026, 10:18 PM UTC

raincole wrote: post #21

sodacanner wrote: post #19

I don't understand all the handwringing. If it's this easy to remove SynthID from an AI-generated image then it wasn't a good solution in the first place.

There is no solution . I don't know why people discuss this subject as if there is a technical solution. As if there are fairies or souls hidden in the pixels that help us tell what is AI generated and what is not.

Sure there is a solution, you are just looking at it the wrong way. Make non-AI images provably unaltered with signed keys from the device (e.g. the camera) that took it.