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MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID

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11–20 of 467 posts

Re: MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID

#11

AI-generated text warning (I submitted - but did not author - the piece), but it seems MS Paint and MS Photos add both a visible (can be turned off) and invisible (cannot be disabled and happens silently in the background with no user notice) watermarks to photos that have been AI-manipulated, even when using a local model to perform the action. It's not clear if this applies to even things like using AI-enhanced bac…

> AI-generated text warning

This seems incorrect to me. Are you basing that on the use of bullet points?

Re: MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID

#13
I get the privacy concerns, and we are right to expect Microsoft to say that this is what their tool may be doing. However, I fear that one day we will look back and wonder why we didn't do more to sign and preserve human authenticity. Having a stamp saying "AI manipulated" should be a part of digital lineage tooling.

Re: MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID

#14

AI-generated text warning (I submitted - but did not author - the piece), but it seems MS Paint and MS Photos add both a visible (can be turned off) and invisible (cannot be disabled and happens silently in the background with no user notice) watermarks to photos that have been AI-manipulated, even when using a local model to perform the action. It's not clear if this applies to even things like using AI-enhanced bac…

I don’t understand the warning.

They're saying that the blogpost is at least partially AI-generated.

Re: MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID

#15
post #5

Interesting. I really didn't think watermarks would end up going anywhere, but maybe with enough adoption we can have easy ai generated content flagging after all?

Not every generative AI model will watermark. Especially not adversarial and disinformation models.

Re: MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID

#16

I get the privacy concerns, and we are right to expect Microsoft to say that this is what their tool may be doing. However, I fear that one day we will look back and wonder why we didn't do more to sign and preserve human authenticity. Having a stamp saying "AI manipulated" should be a part of digital lineage tooling.

Well if that's any reassurance, you can generate a meme picture using AI, then paste it into Paint to add some funny text. That way you can get the best of both worlds.

Re: MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID

#17

I think it would be nice if all cameras digitally signed pictures. You could prove the photo was real.

What would prevent someone from applying the same algorithm on a computer to sign arbitrary images?

Asymetric keys

Re: MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID

#18
post #5

Interesting. I really didn't think watermarks would end up going anywhere, but maybe with enough adoption we can have easy ai generated content flagging after all?

Not every generative AI model will watermark. Especially not adversarial and disinformation models.

So as usual, exactly the things you want it to work on it won’t.

Re: MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID

#19

I think it would be nice if all cameras digitally signed pictures. You could prove the photo was real.

What would prevent someone from applying the same algorithm on a computer to sign arbitrary images?

Presumably the OP is proposing something like a TPM attached to the image sensor that signs the sensor output or something like that. You can’t sign it because you can’t get the key out. The key could be per-camera and be a published list.

I suppose a dedicated fraudster could still stage an appropriate scene. An appropriately lit matte image might even suffice.

Re: MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID

#20

I think it would be nice if all cameras digitally signed pictures. You could prove the photo was real.

What would prevent someone from applying the same algorithm on a computer to sign arbitrary images?

Keys could be stored in something like TPM on Camera, and could sign the image. The key could then be verified from the camera itself to prove the authenticity of the image.

If we as a society deemed it necessary, the camera manufacturer could also provide a list of keys for devices they have manufactured. And an image/key could be provided, and the manufacturer could verify the authenticity that way.

The TPM signing could be tied into the sensor hardware itself, making it difficult, but not impossible, to sign arbitrary images with the TPM.

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