3 ms·

Interesting company, and something that is surely good to watch out for in the future. It is also very needed use case now that generative AI is just about ever

Interesting company, and something that is surely good to watch out for in the future. It is also very needed use case now that generative AI is just about everywhere. There is some cause to be skeptical of the claims on the website, because the site doesn't provide enough information to validate the claims with any rational basis, and there are a number of other companies that have done the same and failed to deliver. There have also been a few court cases now where similar use cases for attribution have been used inappropriately, and resulted in false claims/charges causing great miscarriages of justice (under facial recognition). Hopefully you performed an adequate adversarial review, and have a demonstrable way to rationally prove there are no false positives at a bare minimum.

jrm4 2y ago
I'll bet a dollar that none of this ends up being particularly viable. Feels like an "anti-Photoshop" company; whatever means you might like or want to exist re defending this sort of thing will lose in an arms race. This is not to say that there's nothing that can be done, but I just doubt those solutions will ever be technical.
- matyask 2y ago
  We for sure don't aim to be anti-AI. It's difficult to see how a non technical solution will be enforceable/effective. Watermarking is our initial approach to securing digital identity and copyrights.
matyask 2y ago
Hi there, we have published a demonstration of fingerprint watermarking on audio and images that anyone could just try. In our next phase we will release our first consumer product that will provide value. We have conducted thorough testing on our fingerprint encoding and decoding. We will for sure aim to explain this better when we give users the ability to encode unique signatures. If there are any other particular claim you have not found enough information about then I am happy to elaborate. Could you by any chance link any of those court cases?
- trod123 2y ago
  I will be looking forward to it. The major concern I had just taking a cursory look revolved around the wording of 'unique' signatures. This word is often misused in an out of context way that makes the claim false. When used it has a very specific meaning in math, but many times the claim being made is actually an improper equivalence being made (for marketing). For example, they map some inputs to a finite field that may roll over, which isn't disclosed. This is known to violate the 1:1 map required for a 'unique' property between input and output, excepting some very rigorous methodology and forcibly limited system's/environments. Uniformity of the collisions in such systems is also a very big problem, sometimes they clump, but absent bruteforce checking the entire space there's no way to predict ahead of time when clumping will happen. Similar equivalences have been made in the crypto space, and shown to be false when those systems were rigorously broken later. The existence of collisions given same inputs is proof by contradiction the input->output pair is not unique and fails. I've linked one of the cases with a brief gist below (since Justia doesn't provide a rundown). Harvey Eugene Jr. was arrested based on a false match for a robbery of a Sunglass Hut in Texas (owned by Macy's). He lived at the time in Sacramento CA, he was arrested when he returned to renew his Texas driver's license; during holding he was raped by three other inmates leaving him with permanent debilitating injuries. He was at the time of the robbery provably living in Sacramento. His arrest was based solely on the false positive AI based facial recognition match. https://dockets.justia.com/docket/texas/txsdce/4:2024cv00801/1952110 https://dockets.justia.com/docket/texas/txsdce/4:2024cv00801... There have been many news articles, and several cases, a simple search for "facial recognition false arrest" on google should provide a number of articles. You may also find a few on the ACLU/EFF site as they have a keen interest in going after companies who violate civil rights; their website has a history of some of the more prominent ones.
  - matyask 2y ago
    By unique we mean one of the numbers we can represent by 50 bits in each patch we encode plus some bits for error correction and some bits for noise, it's in the faq but we will explain it better. If the domain is all the encoded patches with a particular id then the mapping is surjective. Thank you for the link and the excerpt!:)

jrm4 2y ago

I'll bet a dollar that none of this ends up being particularly viable. Feels like an "anti-Photoshop" company; whatever means you might like or want to exist re defending this sort of thing will lose in an arms race. This is not to say that there's nothing that can be done, but I just doubt those solutions will ever be technical.

matyask 2y ago
We for sure don't aim to be anti-AI. It's difficult to see how a non technical solution will be enforceable/effective. Watermarking is our initial approach to securing digital identity and copyrights.

matyask 2y ago

Hi there, we have published a demonstration of fingerprint watermarking on audio and images that anyone could just try. In our next phase we will release our first consumer product that will provide value. We have conducted thorough testing on our fingerprint encoding and decoding. We will for sure aim to explain this better when we give users the ability to encode unique signatures. If there are any other particular claim you have not found enough information about then I am happy to elaborate. Could you by any chance link any of those court cases?

trod123 2y ago
I will be looking forward to it. The major concern I had just taking a cursory look revolved around the wording of 'unique' signatures. This word is often misused in an out of context way that makes the claim false. When used it has a very specific meaning in math, but many times the claim being made is actually an improper equivalence being made (for marketing). For example, they map some inputs to a finite field that may roll over, which isn't disclosed. This is known to violate the 1:1 map required for a 'unique' property between input and output, excepting some very rigorous methodology and forcibly limited system's/environments. Uniformity of the collisions in such systems is also a very big problem, sometimes they clump, but absent bruteforce checking the entire space there's no way to predict ahead of time when clumping will happen. Similar equivalences have been made in the crypto space, and shown to be false when those systems were rigorously broken later. The existence of collisions given same inputs is proof by contradiction the input->output pair is not unique and fails. I've linked one of the cases with a brief gist below (since Justia doesn't provide a rundown). Harvey Eugene Jr. was arrested based on a false match for a robbery of a Sunglass Hut in Texas (owned by Macy's). He lived at the time in Sacramento CA, he was arrested when he returned to renew his Texas driver's license; during holding he was raped by three other inmates leaving him with permanent debilitating injuries. He was at the time of the robbery provably living in Sacramento. His arrest was based solely on the false positive AI based facial recognition match. https://dockets.justia.com/docket/texas/txsdce/4:2024cv00801/1952110 https://dockets.justia.com/docket/texas/txsdce/4:2024cv00801... There have been many news articles, and several cases, a simple search for "facial recognition false arrest" on google should provide a number of articles. You may also find a few on the ACLU/EFF site as they have a keen interest in going after companies who violate civil rights; their website has a history of some of the more prominent ones.
- matyask 2y ago
  By unique we mean one of the numbers we can represent by 50 bits in each patch we encode plus some bits for error correction and some bits for noise, it's in the faq but we will explain it better. If the domain is all the encoded patches with a particular id then the mapping is surjective. Thank you for the link and the excerpt!:)