Its 2026... people are deliberately choosing to live in their own realities with no care about objective facts or moral choices. So weird images are a big problem? No they don't matter at all.
If they don't matter, neither does a watermark.
and you need the watermark to tell you the fish with the mustache is fake...
What image is going to change your worldview so radically that the drm saves you?
edit - to be clear you are watermarking 100,000 fishes with mustaches because of your concern over 1 image that "matters" (and you don't even have an image that matters in mind)
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…
i wouldn't have any confidence in being able to remove a 0.5 bit watermark (presence/absence). what you see is probably a functional decoy.
and you need the watermark to tell you the fish with the mustache is fake... What image is going to change your worldview so radically that the drm saves you? edit - to be clear you are watermarking 100,000 fishes with mustaches because of your concern over 1 image that "matters" (and you don't even have an image that matters in mind)
Yes, let's pretend they are adding watermarks because of fishes with mustaches.
When I saw the article I was initially skeptical. I do look down on OpenAI, Google, and other such companies. But on second thought it is not a bad idea to be able to have a quick tool to identify an image as AI generated. And after reading your reaction to it, I am sure now that the watermark is for the best.
So you are in the"nothing to hide, nothing to fear" school of privacy rights? Only criminals and bad actors want private defaults? The burden of proof is proving there is some harm or problem that needs solving and noone has managed that in this thread or generally.
Not sure what's to hide here. The caveat depends on what data is encoded into the watermark. If it's as simple as the date generated and the system that generated it so that it is easily identifiable as AI generated, I'm fine with it. Hell, I'd even say it'd be cool to embed all of the prompts used to generate the image. If it's also including the name of the user or account ID, then we start getting into gray areas. Since I'm not really on the AI hype train, I'm not all that opposed to that info either. I'll never use it so it won't affect me mindset kicks in on this one, but I'd be okay either way for/against embedding user identifiable info.
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 "…
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 keys and a whole trusted media path is built so that the relying party can cryptographically enforce that a trusted camera is being used to capture live images.
Strictly speaking, DRM = digital rights management, which is related to intellectual property. SynthID would only be DRM if Google/OpenAI were claiming IP rights over their images. I don’t even know if that’s legal though.
What value does "strictly speaking" bring to the discussion? So that you don't have to address any of the issues?
Because DRM is primarily used to ensure the content is not shared in a way the owner does not allow. That is not what SynthID is doing. All it does is allow people to know it is a generated image specifically for when it starts to be widely shared on the internet.
So strictly speaking brings a lot to the discussion when you actually think about it. Stating that DRM != SynthID is addressing issues where people seem to think that DRM == SynthID. Those people are wrong, and strictly speaking need to be corrected.
What value does "strictly speaking" bring to the discussion? So that you don't have to address any of the issues?
Because DRM is primarily used to ensure the content is not shared in a way the owner does not allow. That is not what SynthID is doing. All it does is allow people to know it is a generated image specifically for when it starts to be widely shared on the internet. So strictly speaking brings a lot to the discussion when you actually think about it. Stating that DRM != SynthID is addressing issues where people seem to…
You are making a category error --
"this image made by OpenAI" is a drm assertion
You wont be able to assert copyright of the picture that you added an OpenAI red bowtie to, thats a DRM issue.
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 "…
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…
> 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.
You can still use traditional methods to manipulate images, too, so I don't think a "does not contain SynthID watermark" means you can trust that image more. In the other hand, encoding a lot of personal and other information in the watermark (136 bit is a lot) that can not be easily removed and most of the people are unaware of it seems really an 1984-like dystopia.