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Remove-AI-Watermarks – CLI and library for removing AI watermarks from images

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Re: Remove-AI-Watermarks – CLI and library for removing AI watermarks from images

#171

Post by AnthonyMouse »

SecretDreams wrote: post #84
transcriptase wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>due to the arms race that large corporate machines will win Much like how the entirety of Hollywood, book publishers, academic publishers, and game developers have won against piracy despite being some of the largest corps on earth and dedicating untold billions to the issue over the past 30 years?

Yes. Winning against piracy doesn't mean you completely eliminate piracy. It means you scare enough people into not doing it and make it a bit harder to do for others. Losing to piracy would see companies like Netflix and Spotify not thriving.

> Winning against piracy doesn't mean you completely eliminate piracy.

But this is moving the goalposts. You can win against piracy either by making piracy less attractive or by making the paid offering more attractive. The first has utterly failed, piracy remains easy as a rule, and to the extent that they've succeeded it's not only disproportionately by doing the second thing, the DRM itself is a net negative because it has such a small effect on the ease of piracy while making the paid offering worse.

Re: Remove-AI-Watermarks – CLI and library for removing AI watermarks from images

#172

Post by latexr »

bonoboTP wrote: post #21
int0x29 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accepting blindly destroying the concept of thruth should not be the hacker ethos either.

It's already possible to lie with text. Pixels are pixels. If we can't blindly believe pixels to show the truth, we will be simply back to the pre-photography era which managed to have a concept of truth regardless.

For the umpteenth time, scale and ease of access and propagation matters.

A knife and a handgun aren’t comparable to a machine gun and a bomb. When you have equal access to all of those, the damage you can enact is exponentiated.

You could lie with text before, but it took effort and time and skill to do it convincingly. You could also lie with images but they took even more time and effort and skill, greatly limiting the pool of people who could do it and the possible damage.

When anyone anywhere can convincingly lie and have it do two laps around the world in a matter of minutes, the whole game changes.

It’s becoming very hard to believe that people making arguments like yours are doing so in good faith. Maybe you’re not even a person but a shill bot. That’s a very real and trivial possibility today, which is the whole point and illustrates the problem.

Re: Remove-AI-Watermarks – CLI and library for removing AI watermarks from images

#173

Post by throwaway2037 »

xp84 wrote: post #36
tptacek wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It either works reliably or it doesn't; if it doesn't, it's better that everybody be clear about that.

Fair enough. While I would kind of wish AI could be reliably detected, deep down I know this is impossible and it would be pretty bad if we had, say, a prosecution that succeeded because "this 'provably-non-AI' photo places you at the scene of the crime" because only a few underground people know how to remove a watermark.

You raise an interesting point about the artificial generation of evidence used in court. In 1992, Michael Crichton wrote the book Rising Sun, which centers around the editing of security camera video footage to coverup a murder.

Re: Remove-AI-Watermarks – CLI and library for removing AI watermarks from images

#175

Post by victorbjorklund »

j2kun wrote: post #12
akersten wrote: post #7

There'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

Building a tool that tries (and probably fails) to remove the watermark (due to the arms race that large corporate machines will win) is tacitly accepting the barcode. The hacker ethos should be, first and foremost, to run open source models locally without relying on a corporation.

It doesn't make any sense at all. That's like saying browsing the internet with an ad blocker and other privacy tools is a tacit acceptance of tracking and ads, and that you should only visit websites that doesn't track or have ads.

Re: Remove-AI-Watermarks – CLI and library for removing AI watermarks from images

#176

Post by bonoboTP »

latexr wrote: post #172
bonoboTP wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's already possible to lie with text. Pixels are pixels. If we can't blindly believe pixels to show the truth, we will be simply back to the pre-photography era which managed to have a concept of truth regardless.

For the umpteenth time, scale and ease of access and propagation matters. A knife and a handgun aren’t comparable to a machine gun and a bomb. When you have equal access to all of those, the damage you can enact is exponentiated. You could lie with text before, but it took effort and time and skill to do it convincingly. You could also lie with images but they took even more time and effort and skill, greatly limitin…

[flagged]

Re: Remove-AI-Watermarks – CLI and library for removing AI watermarks from images

#177

Post by redsocksfan45 »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #99
tempest_ wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair the state works pretty hard to crush "hobbyist" nuclear weapons programs so you don't really know how far it could get.

By the time you're building (or buying) the necessary highly esoteric and expensive ultracentrifuge setup I think you would be well outside the realm of "hobbyist" unless someone insists on the most unreasonably pedantic definition for the term. Unless we're only considering final assembly. Just gotta get that weapons grade fissile material supplier lined up. That might or might not qualify as rich hobbyist territory…

[dead]

Re: Remove-AI-Watermarks – CLI and library for removing AI watermarks from images

#178

Post by bawolff »

tptacek wrote: post #22
int0x29 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accepting blindly destroying the concept of thruth should not be the hacker ethos either.

It either works reliably or it doesn't; if it doesn't, it's better that everybody be clear about that.

For C2PA and exif, these aren't watermarks, just metadata. You could already remove them with exiftool.

Re: Remove-AI-Watermarks – CLI and library for removing AI watermarks from images

#179

Post by grebc »

streetfighter64 wrote: post #163
grebc wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So letting people know you’ve used AI is not a good thing? Best used in covert is what you’re saying?

Sometimes it is not a "good thing" because it will cause people to react negatively. Whether the public's dislike of AI valid or not depends entirely on your perspective and the situation at hand. Should people be scared of their food containing Red Dye 3? Yes. Aspartame? Maybe. MSG? Probably not. Dihydrogen Monoxide? Nope. Should you feel "shame" for using AI to generate fake news? Yes. Art? Not really. See the nume…

I don’t follow because all I see in other AI threads is how this is the future and people best adjust to the AI reality.

The hyper macho’ism on show by a large majority of pro-AI posters on other threads is frankly embarrassing and if I was trying to promote a positive spin on AI I’d be telling the bro’s to STFU.

Re: Remove-AI-Watermarks – CLI and library for removing AI watermarks from images

#180

Post by AnthonyMouse »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #113
tempest_ wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair the state works pretty hard to crush "hobbyist" nuclear weapons programs so you don't really know how far it could get.

so which one is it here? This subthread starts off with the argument that the big corps will never beat the little determined hackers, one of the founding myths of the early internet. And then every now and then a strong little branch of the argument runs up against an example and it becomes well sure, the little hobbyist hackers don't have anything there but that is because the big corps/gov/billionaires/whatever pu…

> And then every now and then a strong little branch of the argument runs up against an example and it becomes well sure, the little hobbyist hackers don't have anything there but that is because the big corps/gov/billionaires/whatever put so much into beating them.

It's almost never about the level of resources the organization puts in. The usual reason is that there isn't enough incentive to do it. What is a hobbyist going to do with a nuclear weapon? Why spend your time creating one if you, like the overwhelming majority of people, have no desire to blow up a city?

Preventing something that hardly anybody would be trying to do even if it wasn't being suppressed is a lot more practical than preventing something millions of people would do given the chance.

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