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OpenAI Adopts Google's SynthID Watermark for AI Images with Verification Tool

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Re: OpenAI Adopts Google's SynthID Watermark for AI Images with Verification Tool

#111
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These systems should be removed. This is antithetical to freedom and privacy. There should be no way for anyone to track down who posted a political meme, anti-religious message, or any other legally protected speech. This will come back to bite us in the ass if we keep building it. Soon every image or communication we make will be watermarked if we continue to let this shit seep into the commons. Everything from you…

Any privacy-respecting way for these big labs to keep selling their generators while minimizing e.g. political deepfake harms? > Social media platforms can identify, ban, and report abusers. & do but Americans nonetheless argue with troll farms[1] every day & it hurts us [1] 2013-2023, just one known company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency

> minimizing e.g. political deepfake harms?

When your average gullible person will fall for a jpeg and a quote, you don't even need deepfake content. You just need to say something and they'll take it at face value. Deep fakes aren't even necessary. AI literally does not even matter.

If there's such a thing as a "sophisticated actor", they'll be able to remove identifying marks. Not that they'll need to.

What you'll be left with is the 99% of society that has everything they do tracked, and eventually platforms that won't allow anything except for signed and attested communication to take place.

We're building our own mouse trap here. Why don't you see this?

> & do but Americans nonetheless argue with troll farms[1] every day & it hurts us

Again, you don't even need the specter of AI. You just need to say words and certain people will trust it. There's nothing you can do about that. Yellow journalism and propaganda has been a thing for longer than any of us have been alive.

The "fix" you're proposing is a tool to put us all into permanent shackles. It is a tool that will strip away our rights and put us all into shackles. Perhaps within our lifetimes.

Stop building and advocating for this shit.

Re: OpenAI Adopts Google's SynthID Watermark for AI Images with Verification Tool

#113
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the SynthID-Image paper from Oct 2025[0] was an encoder-decoder for which they tested checking a flag or a 136 bit payload in 512x512 images and the watermark's robustness after various transformations. Presumably the deployed version is meaningfully different. [0]: https://arxiv.org/html/2510.09263v1

This is very similar to audiowmark https://github.com/swesterfeld/audiowmark You can stuff per-item database unique IDs, user IDs, geohashes, and other nefarious things inside. We need to protest this LOUDLY. Our devices are being locked down, we're having attestation and trusted computing forced on us, the internet all over the world is undergoing age verification with full ID verification. Just because this is on "…

I'm going to save my protests for anyone trying to watermark real images.

Zero watermarks is a lot worse than semi-effective AI watermarks.

Re: OpenAI Adopts Google's SynthID Watermark for AI Images with Verification Tool

#114
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very similar to audiowmark https://github.com/swesterfeld/audiowmark You can stuff per-item database unique IDs, user IDs, geohashes, and other nefarious things inside. We need to protest this LOUDLY. Our devices are being locked down, we're having attestation and trusted computing forced on us, the internet all over the world is undergoing age verification with full ID verification. Just because this is on "…

The point of SynthID is to make generated images identifiable, in an attempt to prevent 1984-esque situations where you can't believe your eyes and ears. Applying it to screenshots and camera output defeats its only purpose. If the powers-that-be want to enforce age verification, watermarking camera output is not the correct technology to do so. It would be something like HDCP, where camera manufacturers are given ke…

You have missed the point by such a wide margin that I have to wonder if it wasn't intentional.

The same techniques used here can be applied in other domains for other purposes. That would not "defeat its only purpose". The danger is the normalization of watermarking for [ insert good reason here ] with regulation eventually making it mandatory once everyone is accustomed to it. Rinse and repeat to gradually boil the frog.

We live in a world where nearly all printers already watermark everything they print with their serial number. It wouldn't be at all surprising if the next modernized variant of that technology encoded personal and contextual data tied to the user.

Re: OpenAI Adopts Google's SynthID Watermark for AI Images with Verification Tool

#115
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very similar to audiowmark https://github.com/swesterfeld/audiowmark You can stuff per-item database unique IDs, user IDs, geohashes, and other nefarious things inside. We need to protest this LOUDLY. Our devices are being locked down, we're having attestation and trusted computing forced on us, the internet all over the world is undergoing age verification with full ID verification. Just because this is on "…

I'm going to save my protests for anyone trying to watermark real images. Zero watermarks is a lot worse than semi-effective AI watermarks.

Is it? Given local models this delays the current cutting edge at any given time by what, 6 to 12 months at best?

Re: OpenAI Adopts Google's SynthID Watermark for AI Images with Verification Tool

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to save my protests for anyone trying to watermark real images. Zero watermarks is a lot worse than semi-effective AI watermarks.

Is it? Given local models this delays the current cutting edge at any given time by what, 6 to 12 months at best?

Well the person I replied to seems to think it'll be at least semi-effective.

Re: OpenAI Adopts Google's SynthID Watermark for AI Images with Verification Tool

#117
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because something isn't perfect doesn't mean it's not useful. I've already seen posts online that were able to be proven as falsified because someone ran the images through Google for SynthID checks. > How old is photoshop and why is it exempt? For one, it's not developed by Google or OpenAI. The barrier to entry to making realistic but deceptive images with Photoshop is far higher than with AI, and there are al…

I guarantee this works poorly, at best. If this actually works solidly, Google is in deep, deep, deep shit. It would mean that I can put a mark on my non-AI videos and demand that Google not allow upload of my identifiably copyrighted content. This would completely obliterate YouTube.

No, it wouldn't. ContentID is already used by Google for that exact purpose. They appear to be fully in favor of enforcing IP law provided the owning party raises a complaint.

Re: OpenAI Adopts Google's SynthID Watermark for AI Images with Verification Tool

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? Given local models this delays the current cutting edge at any given time by what, 6 to 12 months at best?

Well the person I replied to seems to think it'll be at least semi-effective.

How effective something is as an authoritarian tool (or whatever arbitrary purpose) can be (and very often is) completely unrelated to its effectiveness for some other unrelated purpose. It isn't clear to me why even highly effective AI image watermarks would be better than zero watermarks given what I pointed out about local models.

Re: OpenAI Adopts Google's SynthID Watermark for AI Images with Verification Tool

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Words matter? DRM means digital rights management, not simply any kind of metadata a person doesn’t like.

Yes... they do matter, perhaps using care in your understanding before attempting to nitpick? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management#Wate...

Perhaps bother to read what you linked before being snarky?

> They are not complete DRM mechanisms in their own right, but are used as part of a system for copyright enforcement ...

Because watermarks in and of themselves are not, in fact, DRM. Even if I agree that their mass adoption by BigTech is a really bad sign for personal privacy and (eventually) freedom.

Re: OpenAI Adopts Google's SynthID Watermark for AI Images with Verification Tool

#120

if you tell it to generate the AI image with a black background you can visually see the synthid with a good enough monitor, it's just a repeating fuzzy pattern, nothing special. I have found great success of getting rid of it by masking every 2nd pixel, regenerating missing pixels and then once again masking every 2nd pixel offset by 1. Used an off the shelf model to fill in the pixels, but I also exported a depthma…

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