There's quite a bit of difference in the before and after. I hope they can find a way that better preserves details.
Remove-AI-Watermarks – CLI and library for removing AI watermarks from images
51–60 of 282 posts
Re: Remove-AI-Watermarks – CLI and library for removing AI watermarks from images
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do we care about truth? Without truth freedom and privacy are endangered too. The other comment talks about laws that can already handle that. How if images, video and audio aren’t reliable proof anymore?
The watermarking should be on those things we want to verify as something that was not generated or manipulated. Something you'd add to, for instance, cameras. Putting them on the generated/manipulated is backwards as you can never get every model to watermark.
That model is equally bad though. Given that you're writing this in a discussion about gen AI watermarks, how in the world did you come up with the idea that Gen AI wouldn't be able to add a watermark?
Re: Remove-AI-Watermarks – CLI and library for removing AI watermarks from images
#53This is a bit misleading as for Gemini it only properly removes the visible watermark. To remove SynthID it has to regenerate the image at low noise with SDXL, which will likely destroy a lot of small details, plus won't work for higher res properly (NB2 and GPT Image 2 support up to 4K image outputs)
Is SDXL still the best local image model all these years later? Damn, that’s sad…
With the number of fine-tuned LoRAs and checkpoints - from a realism standpoint, yes SDXL is still very viable. From a prompt adherency perspective, absolutely not.
Qwen-Image-2512 / Z-Image / Flux.2 absolutely crush SDXL if you're actually generating moderately complex scenes.
Re: Remove-AI-Watermarks – CLI and library for removing AI watermarks from images
#54What’s wrong with showing off AI bro? Why the shame?
You're assigning emotions to people based on what you'd like them to feel, not on reality. For example, most americans probably don't feel shame about being american. But it's still a good decision not to go around showing off a bunch of american flags abroad, unless you want people to look at you in a certain way.
Re: Remove-AI-Watermarks – CLI and library for removing AI watermarks from images
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stalin had all the resources imaginables at his disposal. Now Nancy, a tech-phobic waitress who has a grudge against her coworker can make up an entire scenario with one prompt and her colleagues might blindly believe her. Let's not pretend they're the same thing. Gen AI is inevitable. Watermarking is likely futile. But in my opinion it is still very important to discuss how, as a society, we're going to live in a po…
Simple, don't trust what you see on the internet, which has been a constant since the mid 90's when it was invented.
When that idea was originated, the advice was more like:
"Don't trust what you see on the Internet. Trust instead what you read in a reputable daily newspaper, or Peter Jennings or Tom Brokaw on the nightly news, or BBC World News."
Today, the Internet, especially the part which is not trustable, has nearly finished killing most of the "trustworthy" news sources, by outcompeting them for ad dollars - by being way better at targeting ads (e.g. Meta) and by scientifically perfecting addiction (e.g. TikTok). What remains is mostly controlled by governments and has far from a perfect record of being fact-based and impartial.[1] There are a ton of independent people out there in good faith posting facts on the Internet, but we just agreed that we shouldn't trust what we see on the Internet.
So doesn't this become "Don't trust anything"? And doesn't that, in practice, get implemented as "Don't trust anything that challenges what you believe to be true"? This feels like a really, really bad change to our society - and I'd argue it's already completely happened.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/bbc-gaza-documentary-hamas-sancti...
Re: Remove-AI-Watermarks – CLI and library for removing AI watermarks from images
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stalin had all the resources imaginables at his disposal. Now Nancy, a tech-phobic waitress who has a grudge against her coworker can make up an entire scenario with one prompt and her colleagues might blindly believe her. Let's not pretend they're the same thing. Gen AI is inevitable. Watermarking is likely futile. But in my opinion it is still very important to discuss how, as a society, we're going to live in a po…
People will just become numb to images and video and trust nothing: this is already happening.
Yes, it's happened. Except a lot of people do have an exception - they'll trust the slop that reinforces their existing biases, or even if they know in their hearts it's not true, viewing their side's lies regularly still has an effect on the way they think.
Re: Remove-AI-Watermarks – CLI and library for removing AI watermarks from images
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is SDXL still the best local image model all these years later? Damn, that’s sad…
With the number of fine-tuned LoRAs and checkpoints - from a realism standpoint, yes SDXL is still very viable. From a prompt adherency perspective, absolutely not. Qwen-Image-2512 / Z-Image / Flux.2 absolutely crush SDXL if you're actually generating moderately complex scenes.
Do you still need a wacky backend to run them locally or does LM Studio make it easy nowadays? Last I use a local diffusion model was late 2022.
Re: Remove-AI-Watermarks – CLI and library for removing AI watermarks from images
#58I just saw the announcement about OpenAI or so going to use SynthID and all I thought was; what can d be read(located) can be removed. Seems the tool already exists, proving my point.
Yes, I came from that thread and figured this kind of tool was worth mentioning.
Re: Remove-AI-Watermarks – CLI and library for removing AI watermarks from images
#59I don't know I really like the definitive indicator that something is AI so I can completely ignore anything else that comes from them.
If someone's doing something you don't like, you can't really count on them doing it the way you prefer.
You can count on them doing it in a way that's economical for them. It's how email spam filters and ad blockers work. Sure somebody will always find a way to bypass it, and that's the arms race. A filter with zero false positives that removes 80% of slop is pretty darn good though.
Re: Remove-AI-Watermarks – CLI and library for removing AI watermarks from images
#60There's an underappreciated comment in the other thread about SynthID and OpenAI [0] that captures what (IMO) the hacker ethos on this should be. We care about privacy, we should not accept tools that barcode our every digital move. (note that the counter of "well, they don't do that yet " is not particularly convincing) [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48200060
Accepting blindly destroying the concept of thruth should not be the hacker ethos either.
It's best for privacy not to do this in the first place because:
- Watermarks are optional by AI provider so bad actors will circumvent by using another provider
- GH project proves watermarks can be removed
Given these, trying to ensure "truth" is a futile effort unfortunately, and watermarking only gives companies advantage to violate privacy