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

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

#351
post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was forced to create multiple as part of the mojang migration - truly a nightmarish experience to use their AuthN, haven’t seen something quite as bad since

Maybe you were "tricked into", but probably not forced. We are free to refuse, at cost, but free.

The cost is that you can never play Minecraft again

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

#352

My goodness, this has nothing to do with AI problems. I don't understand that people still buy an OS from a company that actively hates it's customers. The amount of things they pull should not even be succesful on a OS you get paid FOR to use.

This is a pretty privileged take, isn't it?

What's the alternative? What if you work at literally any Fortune 500 company?

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

#353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> every image you create *with the help of AI*. Does in fact make a difference.

While it does make a difference, their willingness to quietly integrate watermarking features into what people saw as simple apps for doing simple tasks is unnerving. It only takes a small change for them to start baking your identifiable information into all images they edit, or some government politely asking them to do that. I wonder if in ten years we'll have a horrifying world where everything that leaves a mach…

AI watermarking is now the law.

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

#354
post #129
post #24

The AI aspect of this is a red herring. The real problem is that they're secretly adding in a unique identifier into every image you create. If somebody does not like your meme, they can just send a copyright subpoena to Microsoft to instantly get your full name, address, email, phone number, and any other data associated with your Microsoft account. Just like age verification, this is another weapon in the war again…

> a unique identifier into every image you create Printing (even text) is also a risk: It's very likely your printer is secretly adding marks to the page that contain its serial number and the current timestamp. [0] Meanwhile Microsoft (and Apple) have "telemetry" harvesting those serial numbers of all internal and external devices you've ever had connected or reachable. Then they link them to your MS/Apple account,…

>Then they link them to your MS/Apple account, IP addresses, and the extended social-graph of all computers that were ever in the same room or shared the same bluetooth speaker.

Did it get revealed that Apple did that? This is news to me

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

#355
post #61

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 have some better options. Stop using computers, or if you use a computer, use Linux. Everything is spying on us now. Literally everything. I recently downgraded my MacBook M1 to Sonoma to avoid all this AI privacy invading BS.

Some people are suggesting systemd is spying on you because of /etc/machine-id

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

#356
post #239
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even Notepad isn’t a dumb app anymore! They made breaking changes after 40 years so it has autocorrect, rich text, and Copilot. If I wanted all of that, I would have used a different app!

It automatically saves and reopens whatever you previously pasted in there. Quite a shock the first few times it happens. It's not a safe temporary holding area anymore.

Someone got their use of child porn leaked this way. They opened notepad on a twitch stream and a bunch of CP links came up. I don't remember who it was.

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

#357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the article instead of the headline…….. it’s adding a fairly standard mark to AI generated images to let’s others know, in the same manner a giant swath of the GebAI industry has agreed to.

I think their point is that paint shouldn’t have any GenAI features (or any new features other than compatibility)

That's just nostalgia. Why do we set the bar at windows XP paint instead of windows 1.01 paint which was different? Probably because winXP paint is the one we grew up with, and also the best version. But if we said no new features ever, we'd be stuck on win1.01 paint. The best version of Paint was a complete UI redesign away from the original.

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

#358

My goodness, this has nothing to do with AI problems. I don't understand that people still buy an OS from a company that actively hates it's customers. The amount of things they pull should not even be succesful on a OS you get paid FOR to use.

Not that I love Microsoft, but they would get a lot of heat if they let anybody generate harmful content as well. They can't win on that topic. Now I would not want to appear to defend the mess they've created out of windows, that's not the point.

They have only themselves to blame for this. They've spent decades developing technology to spy on and micro-regulate what their captive customers can do with their property. Now that they have this technology, it's only logical that they be held responsible for misuse.

The only (and inevitable) solution at this point is for big tech to get micro-regulated like the banking industry. The same mindless greed that drove them to take control away from their customers will be responsible for the same control to be taken away from them.

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

#359
post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is kind of interesting when you think about it. what utility does something like paint actually have? did it ever have any real utility? (icon editing?) it always kinda felt like a demo that came with early versions of windows that didn't actually do anything useful.

The utility of Paint is that lightweight software is an absolute fucking godsend (which, Microsoft being Microsoft, is on a mission to ruin). I have all manner of professional tools - Photoshop, Aseprite, Manga Studio, etc, and if the edit is something that can be done in Paint, I will use Paint over any of the others, because I'll be done editing before I've even managed to open the file in another program.

It's not a godsend if it lacks features, eg. it would be much more useful for editing photographs if it had a clone tool.

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

#360

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.

If an adversary knows how the watermark is embedded they can replace it with noise so its not like you can rely on these watermarks anyway.

Yeah you can do that, and it's a crime
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