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Google is embedding inaudible watermarks into its AI generated music
- arberx 3y agoNFTs are a great usecase for this.
- salt-thrower 3y agoPlease elaborate.
- chpatrick 3y agoMaybe they put pictures of cats in: https://twistedsifter.com/2013/01/hidden-images-embedded-into-songs-spectrographs/ https://twistedsifter.com/2013/01/hidden-images-embedded-int...
- jordanreger 3y agoi've heard a ton of aphex twin and disasterpeace, one of my favorite songs being compass, and i've never even thought about this. cool to see it's hidden in such a beautiful song
- Sparkyte 3y agoProbably the best song ever because it contains cats.
- echelon 3y agoWhat watermarking libraries for images, audio, or video is HN using? We've found a number of them, but the good ones are GPL3 [1]. I might email the authors about getting a license if there isn't anything equivalent. [1] https://github.com/swesterfeld/audiowmark https://github.com/swesterfeld/audiowmark is fantastic
- lencastre 3y agoCounting the seconds until someone gets an audio recording with 0-click Trojan malware. I miss the world when all you got was ILOVEYOU in MS Word…
- echelon 3y agoThe payloads being encoded are extremely tiny. Typically not even enough to store a full UUID. This is configurable, of course, but you sacrifice recoverability and/or quality of the original signal if you try to store more bits.
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoIs there some reason you don't just use it under GPLv3? Are you trying to create a derivative work you don't want to publish under the same license?
- cebert 3y agoIf you removed a watermark, could it be considered to be a violation of the DMCA?
- henriquez 3y agoThat’s assuming a) AI-generated tracks were copyrightable in the first place, and b) watermarks are copy-protection mechanisms Neither a nor b are true so it’s probably fine.
- echelon 3y agoWatermarks are these things: - Non-bulletproof provenance data - Non-bulletproof abuse tracking - Non-bulletproof proliferation tracking - Security sold to those concerned about AI (I build an AI system, so these are all top of mind.)
- inquirerGeneral 3y agoThis is really cool. I like how the headline is clickbait so people get a negative impression from it, while it's literally a great positive thing.
- amelius 3y agoProbably easy to remove these watermarks with some autoencoder approach similar to: https://www.kaggle.com/code/therealcyberlord/watermark-removal-using-convolutional-autoencoder https://www.kaggle.com/code/therealcyberlord/watermark-remov...
- vletal 3y agoThe example in the link you posted is equivalent to quietly whispering "GENERATED BY GOOGLE" every 15 seconds of over the generated track. Regenerating an audio is similar to painting a fake painting. It is the strokes which will reveal the original author. But in this case you want to claim the piece for yourself - stripping the signature elements of the author BUT still preserve the original quality. So, make sure the ID is not more nuanced and distributed than you might think :) Otherwise your auto-encoder might reproduce it as well.
- TerrifiedMouse 3y agoI wonder how said watermarks will survive lossy audio compression since a big part of lossy audio compression is to remove parts of the signal humans can't hear and won't notice is gone.
- vachina 3y agoThere was a time when Blu-ray players had to implement such audio watermark decoder, to detect and stop playback unauthorized Blu-ray copies. > Cinavia's in-band signaling introduces intentional spread spectrum phase distortion in the frequency domain of each individual audio channel separately, giving a per-channel digital signal that can yield up to around 0.2 bits per second. > Cinavia is designed to stay within the audio signal and to survive all common forms of audio transfer, including lossy data compression using discrete cosine transform, MP3, DTS, or Ogg Vorbis. It is designed to survive digital and analog sound recording and reproduction via microphones, direct audio connections and broadcasting, and does so by using audio frequencies within the hearing range.
- TerrifiedMouse 3y agoSo the watermark is audible to listeners.
- rcxdude 3y agono, because it's very small phase modulations. The main tradeoff is you need a relatively long segment of audio to detect it.
- InCityDreams 3y agoI recently bought a new synth...i wonder if it has a signature? *#>Synth manufacturers start licking their lips. And, for the amateur muso's that still don't get it: imagine having to pay/ have had paid for every time a dx7 was used in a tune, or an ms20?
- 613style 3y ago
- xyproto 3y agoYet another reason to use local LLMs.
- system2 3y agoAudio maybe but visuals require so much processing power and a heavy image database. I am impatiently waiting for a chatgpt4 rival for local.
- xyproto 3y agoIt depends on what you are planning to do. Stable diffusion works great locally on both the dell+linux and the mac laptop I tried it on. This one was easy to use while exploring models from huggingface: https://diffusionbee.com/ https://diffusionbee.com/ DALL-E still gives better results, though.
- snickerbockers 3y ago>Watermarking tools like SynthID are seen as an important safeguard against some of the harms of generative AI. Except the lack of watermark doesn't necessarily exclude the possibility of ai generation.
- davidmurdoch 3y agoAnd I'm sure the opposite will happen as well, people who want to pass human work as AI generated by adding watermarks.
- peddling-brink 3y agoWhy? Just to muddy the waters?
- doomroot 3y agoTo sell a product. “Look at what our tool can produce.”
- solarkraft 3y agoPossibly for plausible deniability. "I never said that, look, here's the AI watermark". It has even been argued in court that a picture isn't tight evidence due to automatic processing, after all.
- morkalork 3y agoIt excludes them from being blamed for any fallout from an unsigned file though.
- LordShredda 3y agoIt's for copywrite
- LegibleCrimson 3y agoCopyright. Copywrite means something else.
- varelse 3y ago[dead]
- Regnore 3y agoWatermarks can be helpful, but I believe that provenance via digital signatures is ultimately a better solution. Curious why Google doesn’t join the CAI (https://contentauthenticity.org/ https://contentauthenticity.org/) and use their approach for provenance of Google’s generated audio files.
- Waterluvian 3y agoI walked through the website and I admit, I still have no clue how CAI technically implements this concept. How does it work for audio media?
- Regnore 3y agoAt a high level the idea is media is digitally signed by whomever produces it to prove provenance - similar to HTTPS. Depending on how much time/interest you have, https://c2pa.org/ https://c2pa.org/ has resources which explains more technical details about the process
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoHow is this supposed to do any good? Bob produces something with AI but claims he produced it himself and signs it with his private key. AI produces something and signs it or doesn't, but if it's signed you can just throw the signature away and either publish it as unsigned or sign it again with a different key. Signatures allow Alice to verify that something is signed by someone who has Bob's private key. If only Bob has Bob's private key, that means it was signed by Bob. It doesn't tell you whether it was generated by AI or not if Bob doesn't want you to know, because Bob can sign whatever he wants with his private key. In this case "Bob" is presumably supposed to be some camera with DRM, but that means it will be in the physical control of attackers and anybody who can crack any camera by any manufacturer can extract the private key and use it to sign whatever they want, which is inevitably going to happen. Keys will be available for sale to anyone who wants one and doesn't have the technical acumen to extract one themselves. Since that makes the whole system worthless, what's the point?
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y agoUse it for automated composition and then recreate it in a DAW
- elif 3y agoSure it survives compression, noises added, etc.. but surely it cannot survive, say, 100 bogus SynthID formatted inaudible watermark datas being added?
- LegibleCrimson 3y agoI'm assuming that doing that would result in audible changes. Like lossy but transparent encoding, repeated application often loses transparency quickly.
- dist-epoch 3y agoIt should. That's how GPS signals work, you receive 20 of them superimposed below the noise floor, and you use math and known pseudo-random-generator seeds to separate them.
- ChuckMcM 3y agoInteresting take, for folks who have played around with digital signal processing (DSP) and low bandwidth / noise tolerant digital signals can probably come up with a half dozen different ways to do this and have it both survive all encoding methodologies and all compression/decompression schemes (at least ones that strive to keep the audio "nearly identical" to the human ear) It would not survive if you had an analysis package that could back compute the terms used by the model to generate the track and you re-generated the track with your own post processing, but that is a lot of work that most people would avoid. It would be hilarious if someone built a model that you could query for it to tell you if there was subaudible information in the track and if so remove it (automating the above step to an AI task). There have been projects that put subaudible tones in audio to trigger toys. So when you're watching a cartoon your toy would respond to the cartoon. Some people may, or may not, have considered doing something like that for muzak at businesses so that your phone OS could report back you had entered the business within a certain window of looking at an ad for that business.
- fsckboy 3y agowhen you say (paraphrasal quotes) "the inaudible will be preserved through lossy compression designed around knowledge of human hearing" you're essentially saying that "undefined behavior will be preserved through optimization", and that is a boldly optimistic claim.
- ChuckMcM 3y agoI think you and I may be talking about different things. If you know what phase noise is and understand the term -10 dBc @ 1kHz, then we might be on the same page. If you don't consider the following; There are tones, things you can hear typically in the range of 15 Hz to 22 kHz. When those tones vary in frequency over time by a few Hertz, it is unlikely that you can perceive that variation. Your ear is both logarithmic in its sensitivity to volume and not particularly sensitive to absolute frequency. If you shift an entire spectrum "up" a couple of Hz your ear won't notice, and similarly if you shift it "down" a couple of Hz you won't notice. This is especially true if you do it slowly (over the course of 100 milliseconds or so). Tape decks and turntables do this, they try to minimize it though. The specification that tells you how closely they track rotational speed is "Wow and Flutter" and a good number is < 0.3%, a studio recorder might be less than 0.1%. With DSP you can easily pull out a spectrum shift of < 0.05% if it is 'regular'. That shift can be a "frequency shift keying" (FSK) signal with forward error correction in it. (think shifted 'up' as one (1) bits and shifted 'down' as zero (0) bits). Running the clip through an FFT and monitoring phase shift in the bins would recover this string of bits. And even if you didn't get enough to error correct the original message, their presence would be unmistakable. All existing audio compression schemes do not affect the phase relationship of the spectrum they are compressing. That's a design feature. To be fair, I wouldn't understand any of this if I hadn't been delving into software defined radio and learning DSP techniques for modulation and demodulation with data recovery in the presence of signal distortions and interference. And I completely understand that there is a language challenge when the terms 'audibly imperceptible' and 'inaudible' are treated as synonyms.
- ifeja 3y agoDoes this mean the watermark can be removed if you strip out all inaudible content? I expect not
- vletal 3y agoNo. The watermark is inaudible. Btw. audio compression is already doing most of the "stripping inaudible" stuff. You know, why wasting bits on something which is less likely to by picked up by the listener. It is done by assuming a model of human hearing.
- dist-epoch 3y agoOn one hand people say stuff like "all AI generated content should be clearly marked". But when you mark it they say "why u do that?" You just can't win.
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoThe "clearly marked" thing seems to be that people are concerned about AI and marking it is a way to satisfy demand for Something Must Be Done. The fact that it won't work is kind of irrelevant because "working" means occupying the people who want to impose bad rules with something to argue about. But then other people look at what they're proposing and say, "hey, you know this is a farce, right?"
- lupusreal 3y ago[dead]
- dragonwriter 3y ago> Watermarking tools like SynthID are seen as an important safeguard against some of the harms of generative AI. They are an important enabler of any potential harms for generative AI, because they provide a false sense of security, and the entities you should be most concerned about using generative AI to harm you will just use their own toolchains that don't put watermarks in, even if a regulatory regime is established effectively limiting public use to hosted systems which are compelled to use watermarks.