9 ms·

The interesting tidbit here is SynthID. While a good first step, it doesn't solve the problem of AI generated content NOT having any kind of watermark. So we

The interesting tidbit here is SynthID. While a good first step, it doesn't solve the problem of AI generated content NOT having any kind of watermark. So we can prove that something WITH the ID is AI generated but we can't prove that something without one ISN'T AI generated. Like it would be nice if all photo and video generated by the big players would have some kind of standardized identifier on them - but now you're left with the bajillion other "grey market" models that won't give a damn about that.

morkalork 11mo ago
Labelling open source models as "grey market" is a heck of a presumption
- theoldgreybeard 11mo ago
  It's why I used "scare quotes".
- bigfishrunning 11mo ago
  Every model is "grey market". They're all trained on data without complying with any licensing terms that may exist, be they proprietary or copyleft. Every major AI model is an instance of IP theft.
markdog12 11mo ago
I asked Gemini "dymamic view" how SynthID works: https://gemini.google.com/share/62fb0eb38e6b https://gemini.google.com/share/62fb0eb38e6b
slashdev 11mo ago
If there was a standardized identifier, there would be software dedicated to just removing it. I don't see how it would defeat the cat and mouse game.
- paulryanrogers 11mo ago
  It doesn't have to be perfect to be helpful. For example, it's trivial to post an advertisement without disclosure. Yet it's illegal, so large players mostly comply and harm is less likely on the whole.
  - slashdev 11mo ago
    You'd need a similar law around posting AI photos/videos without disclosure. Which maybe is where we're heading. It still won't prevent it, but it would prevent large players from doing it.
- aqme28 11mo ago
  I don't think it will be easy to just remove it. It's built into the image and thus won't be the same every time. Plus, any service good at reverse-image search (like Google) can basically apply that to determine whether they generated it. There will always be a way to defeat anything, but I don't see why this won't work for like 90% of cases.
  - VWWHFSfQ 11mo ago
    There will be a model trained to remove synthids from graphics generated by other models
  - flir 11mo ago
    > I don't think it will be easy to just remove it. Always has been so far. You add noise until the signal gets swamped. In order to remain imperceptible it's a tiny signal, so it's easy to swamp.
  - famouswaffles 11mo ago
    It's an image. There's simply no way to add a watermark to an image that's both imperceptible to the user and non-trivial to remove. You'd have to pick one of those options.
    - 11mo ago
echelon 11mo ago
This watermarking ceremony is useless. We will always have local models. Eventually the Chinese will release a Nano Banana equivalent as open source.
- dragonwriter 11mo ago
  > We will always have local models. If watermarking becomes a legal mandate, it will inevitably include a prohibition on distributing (and using and maybe even possessing, but the distribution ban is the thing that will have the most impact, since it is the part that is most policable, and most people aren't going to be training their own models, except, of course, the most motivated bad actors) open models that do not include watermarking as a baked-in model feature. So, for most users, it'll be much less accessible (and, at the same time, it won't solve the problem.)
  - ahtihn 11mo ago
    I don't see how banning distribution would do anything: distributing pirated games, movies, software is banned in most countries and yet pirated content is trivial to find for anyone who cares. As long as someone somewhere is publishing models that don't watermark output, there's basically nothing that can stop those models from being used.
- simonw 11mo ago
  Qwen-Image-Edit is pretty good already: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/19/qwen-image-edit/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/19/qwen-image-edit/
  - tezza 11mo ago
    Qwen won the latest models round last month… https://generative-ai.review/2025/09/september-2025-image-generation-qwen-image-vs-google-imagegen-v4-vs-google-nano-banana/ https://generative-ai.review/2025/09/september-2025-image-ge... (non-pro Nano Banana)
staplers 11mo ago
have some kind of standardized identifier on them Take this a step further and it'll be a personal identifying watermark (only the company can decode). Home printers already do this to some degree.
- theoldgreybeard 11mo ago
  yeah, personally identifying undetectable watermarks are kindof a terrifying prospect
  - overfeed 11mo ago
    It is terrifying, but inevitable. Perhaps AI companies flooding the commons with excrement wasn't the best idea, now we all have to suffer the consequences.
baby 11mo ago
It solves some problems! For example, if you want to run a camgirl website based on AI models and want to also prove that you're not exploiting real people
- echelon 11mo ago
  Your use case doesn't even make sense. What customers are clamoring for that feature? I doubt any paying customer in the market for (that product) cares. If the law cares, the law has tools to inquire. All of this is trivially easy to circumvent ceremony. Google is doing this to deflect litigation and to preserve their brand in the face of negative press. They'll do this (1) as long as they're the market leader, (2) as long as there aren't dozens of other similar products - especially ones available as open source, (3) as long as the public is still freaked out / new to the idea anyone can make images and video of whatever, and (4) as long as the signing compute doesn't eat into the bottom line once everyone in the world has uniform access to the tech. The idea here is that {law enforcement, lawyers, journalists} find a deep fake {illegal, porn, libelous, controversial} image and goes to Google to ask who made it. That only works for so long, if at all. Once everyone can do this and the lookup hit rates (or even inquiries) are < 0.01%, it'll go away. It's really so you can tell journalists "we did our very best" so that they shut up and stop writing bad articles about "Google causing harm" and "Google enabling the bad guys". We're just in the awkward phase where everyone is freaking out that you can make images of Trump wearing a bikini, Tim Cook saying he hates Apple and loves Samsung, or the South Park kids deep faking each other into silly circumstances. In ten years, this will be normal for everyone. Writing the sentence "Dr. Phil eats a bagel" is no different than writing the prompt "Dr. Phil eats a bagel". The former has been easy to do for centuries and required the brain to do some work to visualize. Now we have tools that previsualize and get those ideas as pixels into the brain a little faster than ASCII/UTF-8 graphemes. At the end of the day, it's the same thing. And you'll recall that various forms of written text - and indeed, speech itself - have been illegal in various times, places, and jurisdictions throughout history. You didn't insult Caesar, you didn't blaspheme the medieval church, and you don't libel in America today.
  - shevy-java 11mo ago
xnx 11mo ago
SynthID has been in use for over 2 years.
akersten 11mo ago
Some days it feels like I'm the only hacker left who doesn't want government mandated watermarking in creative tools. Were politicians 20 years ago as overreative they'd have demanded Photoshop leave a trace on anything it edited. The amount of moral panic is off the charts. It's still a computer, and we still shouldn't trust everything we see. The fundamentals haven't changed.
- mlmonkey 11mo ago
  You do know that every color copier comes with the ability to identify US currency and would refuse to copy it? And that every color printer leaves a pattern of faint yellow dots on every printout that uniquely identifies the printer?
  - potsandpans 11mo ago
    And that's not a good thing.
    - mlmonkey 11mo ago
      I'm just responding to this by OP: > Were politicians 20 years ago as overreative they'd have demanded Photoshop leave a trace on anything it edited.
    - fwip 11mo ago
      Why not? Like, genuinely.
      - potsandpans 11mo ago
        I generally don't think that's it's good or just for a government to collude with manufacturers to track/trace it's citizens without consent or notice. And even if notice was given, I'd still be against it The arguments put forward by people generally I don't find compelling -- for example, in this thread around protecting against counterfeit. The "force" applied to address these concerns is totally out of proportion. Whenever these discussions happen, I feel like they descend into a general viewpoint, "if we could technically solve any possible crime, we should do everything in our power to solve it." I'm against this viewpoint, and acknowledge that that means _some crime_ occurs. That's acceptable to me. I don't feel that society is correctly structured to "treat" crime appropriately, and technology has outpaced our ability to holistically address it. Generally, I don't see (speaking for the US) the highest incarceration rate in the world to be a good thing, or being generally effective, and I don't believe that increasing that number will change outcomes.
swatcoder 11mo ago
The incentive for commercial providers to apply watermarks is so that they can safely route and classify generated content when it gets piped back in as training or reference data from the wild. That it's something that some users want is mostly secondary, although it is something they can earn some social credit for by advertising. You're right that there will existed generated content without these watermarks, but you can bet that all the commercial providers burning $$$$ on state of the art models will gradually coalesce around some means of widespread by-default/non-optional watermarking for content they let the public generate so that they can all avoid drowning in their own filth.
mortenjorck 11mo ago
Reminder that even in the hypothetical world where every AI image is digitally watermarked, and all cameras have a TPM that writes a hash of every photo to the blockchain, there’s nothing to stop you from pointing that perfectly-verified camera at a screen showing your perfectly-watermarked AI image and taking a picture. Image verification has never been easy. People have been airbrushed out of and pasted into photos for over a century; AI just makes it easier and more accessible. Expecting a “click to verify” workflow is unreasonable as it has ever been; only media literacy and a bit of legwork can accomplish this task.
- fwip 11mo ago
  Competent digital watermarks usually survive the 'analog hole'. Screen-cam resistant watermarks have been in use since at least 2020, and if memory serves, back to 2010 when I first starting reading about them, but I don't recall what it was called back then.
  - simonw 11mo ago
    I just tried asking Gemini about a photo I took of my screen showing an image I edited with Nano Banana Pro... and it said "All or part of the content was generated with Google AI. SynthID detected in less than 25% of the image". Photo-of-a-screen: https://gemini.google.com/share/ab587bdcd03e https://gemini.google.com/share/ab587bdcd03e It reported 25-50% for the image without having been through that analog hole: https://gemini.google.com/share/022e486fd6bf https://gemini.google.com/share/022e486fd6bf
    - fwip 11mo ago
      Thanks for testing it!
zaidf 11mo ago
This is what C2PA is trying to do: https://c2pa.org/ https://c2pa.org/
losvedir 11mo ago
I'm sure Apple will roll something out in the coming years. Now that just anyone can easily AI themselves into a picture in front of the Eiffel tower, they'll want a feature that will let their users prove that they _really_ took that photo in front of the Eiffel tower (since to a lot of people sharing that you're on a Paris vacation is the point, more than the particular photo). I bet it will be called "Real Photos" or something like that, and the pictures will be signed by the camera hardware. Then iMessage will put a special border around it or something, so that when people share the photos with other Apple users they can prove that it was a real photo taken with their phone's camera.
- pigpop 11mo ago
  Does anyone other than you actually care about your vacation photos? There used to be a joke about people who did slideshows (on an actual slide projector) of their vacation photos at parties.
- panarky 11mo ago
  > a real photo taken with their phone's camera How "real" are iPhone photos? They're also computationally generated, not just the light that came through the lens. Even without any other post-processing, iPhones generate gibberish text when attempting to sharpen blurry images, they delete actual textures and replace them with smooth, smeared surfaces that look like a watercolor or oil paintings, and combine data from multiple frames to give dogs five legs.
  - wyre 11mo ago
    Don’t be a pedant. You know very well there is a big different between a photo taken on an iPhone and a photo edited with Nano Banana.
- omnimus 11mo ago
  this already exists. its called 35mm film camera.
  - infthi 11mo ago
vunderba 11mo ago
Regardless of how you feel about this kind of steganography, it seems clear that outside of a courtroom, deepfakes still have the potential to do massive damage. Unless the watermark randomly replaces objects in the scene with bananas, these images/videos will still spread like wildfire on platforms like TikTok, where the average netizen's idea of due diligence is checking for a six‑fingered hand... at best.
lazide 11mo ago
It solves a real problem - if you have something sketchy, the big players can repudiate it, the authorities can more formally define the black market, and we can have a ‘war on deepfakes’ to further enable the authorities in their attempts to control the narratives.
NoMoreNicksLeft 11mo ago
I don't believe that you can do this for photography. For AI-images, if the embedded data has enough information (model identification and random seed), one can prove that it was AI by recreating it on the fly and comparing. How do you prove that a photographic image was created by a CCD? If your AI-generated image were good enough to pass, then hacking hardware (or stealing some crypto key to sign it) would "prove" that it was a real photograph. Hell, it might even be possible for some arbitrary photographs to come up with an AI prompt that produces them or something similar enough to be indistinguishable to the human eye, opening up the possibility of "proving" something is fake even when it was actually real. What you want just can't work, not even from a theoretical or practical standpoint, let alone the other concerns mentioned in this thread.
gigel82 11mo ago
We need to be super careful with how legislation around this is passed and implemented. As it currently stands, I can totally see this as a backdoor to surveillance and government overreach. If social media platforms are required by law to categorize content as AI generated, this means they need to check with the public "AI generation" providers. And since there is no agreed upon (public) standard for imperceptible watermarks hashing that means the content (image, video, audio) in its entirety needs to be uploaded to the various providers to check if it's AI generated. Yes, it sounds crazy, but that's the plan; imagine every image you post on Facebook/X/Reddit/Whatsapp/whatever gets uploaded to Google / Microsoft / OpenAI / UnnamedGovernmentEntity / etc. to "check if it's AI". That's what the current law in Korea and the upcoming laws in California and EU (for August 2026) require :(
DenisM 11mo ago
It would be more productive for camera manufacturers to embed a per-device digital signature. Those care to prove their image is genuine could publish both pre and post processed images for transparency.
domoritz 11mo ago
I don't understand why there isn't an obvious, visible watermark at all. Yes, one could remove it but let's assume 95% of people don't bother removing the visible watermark. It would really help with seeing instantly when an image was AI generated.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
benlivengood 11mo ago
You have to validate from the other direction. Let CCD sensors sign their outputs, and digital photo-editing produce a chain of custody with further signatures. Maybe zero knowledge proofs could provide anonymity, or a simple solution is to ship the same keys in every camera model, or let them use anonymous sim-style cards with N-month certificate validity. Not everyone needs to prove the veracity of their photos, but make it cheap enough and most people probably will by default.
smusamashah 11mo ago
This is what the SynthID signature looks like on Nano Banana images https://www.reddit.com/r/nanobanana/comments/1o1tvbm/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nanobanana/comments/1o1tvbm/ And if it can be seen like that, it should be removeable too. There are more examples in that thread.
- frumiousirc 11mo ago
  > more examples in that thread Some supposition: A Fourier amplitude image should show that pattern as peaks at a certain angle/radius location. The exact location may be part of the identification scheme. Running peak finding on the Fourier image and then zeroing out the frequencies in the peak should remove the pattern. Modeling the shape of the peak would allow mimicking the application of a legit SynthID signature. If anyone tries/tried this already, I'd love to see the results.
ethmarks 11mo ago
> now you're left with the bajillion other "grey market" models that won't give a damn about that. Exactly. When the barrier to entry for training a okay-ish AI model (not SOTA, obviously) is only a few thousand compute hours on H100s, you couldn't possibly hope to police the training of 100% of new models. Not to mention that lots of existing models are already out there are fully open-source. There will always be AI models that don't adhere to watermark regulations, especially if they were created a country that doesn't enforce your regulations. You can't hope to solve the problem of non-watermarked AI completely. And by solving it partially by mandating that the big AI labs add a unified watermark, you condition people to be even more susceptible to AI images because "if it was AI, it would have a watermark". It's truly a no-win situation.

morkalork 11mo ago

Labelling open source models as "grey market" is a heck of a presumption

theoldgreybeard 11mo ago
It's why I used "scare quotes".
bigfishrunning 11mo ago
Every model is "grey market". They're all trained on data without complying with any licensing terms that may exist, be they proprietary or copyleft. Every major AI model is an instance of IP theft.

markdog12 11mo ago

I asked Gemini "dymamic view" how SynthID works: https://gemini.google.com/share/62fb0eb38e6b https://gemini.google.com/share/62fb0eb38e6b

slashdev 11mo ago

If there was a standardized identifier, there would be software dedicated to just removing it. I don't see how it would defeat the cat and mouse game.

paulryanrogers 11mo ago
It doesn't have to be perfect to be helpful. For example, it's trivial to post an advertisement without disclosure. Yet it's illegal, so large players mostly comply and harm is less likely on the whole.
- slashdev 11mo ago
  You'd need a similar law around posting AI photos/videos without disclosure. Which maybe is where we're heading. It still won't prevent it, but it would prevent large players from doing it.
aqme28 11mo ago
I don't think it will be easy to just remove it. It's built into the image and thus won't be the same every time. Plus, any service good at reverse-image search (like Google) can basically apply that to determine whether they generated it. There will always be a way to defeat anything, but I don't see why this won't work for like 90% of cases.
- VWWHFSfQ 11mo ago
  There will be a model trained to remove synthids from graphics generated by other models
- flir 11mo ago
  > I don't think it will be easy to just remove it. Always has been so far. You add noise until the signal gets swamped. In order to remain imperceptible it's a tiny signal, so it's easy to swamp.
- famouswaffles 11mo ago
  It's an image. There's simply no way to add a watermark to an image that's both imperceptible to the user and non-trivial to remove. You'd have to pick one of those options.
  - 11mo ago

echelon 11mo ago

This watermarking ceremony is useless. We will always have local models. Eventually the Chinese will release a Nano Banana equivalent as open source.

dragonwriter 11mo ago
> We will always have local models. If watermarking becomes a legal mandate, it will inevitably include a prohibition on distributing (and using and maybe even possessing, but the distribution ban is the thing that will have the most impact, since it is the part that is most policable, and most people aren't going to be training their own models, except, of course, the most motivated bad actors) open models that do not include watermarking as a baked-in model feature. So, for most users, it'll be much less accessible (and, at the same time, it won't solve the problem.)
- ahtihn 11mo ago
  I don't see how banning distribution would do anything: distributing pirated games, movies, software is banned in most countries and yet pirated content is trivial to find for anyone who cares. As long as someone somewhere is publishing models that don't watermark output, there's basically nothing that can stop those models from being used.
simonw 11mo ago
Qwen-Image-Edit is pretty good already: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/19/qwen-image-edit/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/19/qwen-image-edit/
- tezza 11mo ago
  Qwen won the latest models round last month… https://generative-ai.review/2025/09/september-2025-image-generation-qwen-image-vs-google-imagegen-v4-vs-google-nano-banana/ https://generative-ai.review/2025/09/september-2025-image-ge... (non-pro Nano Banana)

staplers 11mo ago

have some kind of standardized identifier on them Take this a step further and it'll be a personal identifying watermark (only the company can decode). Home printers already do this to some degree.

theoldgreybeard 11mo ago
yeah, personally identifying undetectable watermarks are kindof a terrifying prospect
- overfeed 11mo ago
  It is terrifying, but inevitable. Perhaps AI companies flooding the commons with excrement wasn't the best idea, now we all have to suffer the consequences.

baby 11mo ago

It solves some problems! For example, if you want to run a camgirl website based on AI models and want to also prove that you're not exploiting real people

echelon 11mo ago
Your use case doesn't even make sense. What customers are clamoring for that feature? I doubt any paying customer in the market for (that product) cares. If the law cares, the law has tools to inquire. All of this is trivially easy to circumvent ceremony. Google is doing this to deflect litigation and to preserve their brand in the face of negative press. They'll do this (1) as long as they're the market leader, (2) as long as there aren't dozens of other similar products - especially ones available as open source, (3) as long as the public is still freaked out / new to the idea anyone can make images and video of whatever, and (4) as long as the signing compute doesn't eat into the bottom line once everyone in the world has uniform access to the tech. The idea here is that {law enforcement, lawyers, journalists} find a deep fake {illegal, porn, libelous, controversial} image and goes to Google to ask who made it. That only works for so long, if at all. Once everyone can do this and the lookup hit rates (or even inquiries) are < 0.01%, it'll go away. It's really so you can tell journalists "we did our very best" so that they shut up and stop writing bad articles about "Google causing harm" and "Google enabling the bad guys". We're just in the awkward phase where everyone is freaking out that you can make images of Trump wearing a bikini, Tim Cook saying he hates Apple and loves Samsung, or the South Park kids deep faking each other into silly circumstances. In ten years, this will be normal for everyone. Writing the sentence "Dr. Phil eats a bagel" is no different than writing the prompt "Dr. Phil eats a bagel". The former has been easy to do for centuries and required the brain to do some work to visualize. Now we have tools that previsualize and get those ideas as pixels into the brain a little faster than ASCII/UTF-8 graphemes. At the end of the day, it's the same thing. And you'll recall that various forms of written text - and indeed, speech itself - have been illegal in various times, places, and jurisdictions throughout history. You didn't insult Caesar, you didn't blaspheme the medieval church, and you don't libel in America today.
- shevy-java 11mo ago

xnx 11mo ago

SynthID has been in use for over 2 years.

akersten 11mo ago

Some days it feels like I'm the only hacker left who doesn't want government mandated watermarking in creative tools. Were politicians 20 years ago as overreative they'd have demanded Photoshop leave a trace on anything it edited. The amount of moral panic is off the charts. It's still a computer, and we still shouldn't trust everything we see. The fundamentals haven't changed.

mlmonkey 11mo ago
You do know that every color copier comes with the ability to identify US currency and would refuse to copy it? And that every color printer leaves a pattern of faint yellow dots on every printout that uniquely identifies the printer?
- potsandpans 11mo ago
  And that's not a good thing.
  - mlmonkey 11mo ago
    I'm just responding to this by OP: > Were politicians 20 years ago as overreative they'd have demanded Photoshop leave a trace on anything it edited.
  - fwip 11mo ago
    Why not? Like, genuinely.
    - potsandpans 11mo ago
      I generally don't think that's it's good or just for a government to collude with manufacturers to track/trace it's citizens without consent or notice. And even if notice was given, I'd still be against it The arguments put forward by people generally I don't find compelling -- for example, in this thread around protecting against counterfeit. The "force" applied to address these concerns is totally out of proportion. Whenever these discussions happen, I feel like they descend into a general viewpoint, "if we could technically solve any possible crime, we should do everything in our power to solve it." I'm against this viewpoint, and acknowledge that that means _some crime_ occurs. That's acceptable to me. I don't feel that society is correctly structured to "treat" crime appropriately, and technology has outpaced our ability to holistically address it. Generally, I don't see (speaking for the US) the highest incarceration rate in the world to be a good thing, or being generally effective, and I don't believe that increasing that number will change outcomes.

swatcoder 11mo ago

The incentive for commercial providers to apply watermarks is so that they can safely route and classify generated content when it gets piped back in as training or reference data from the wild. That it's something that some users want is mostly secondary, although it is something they can earn some social credit for by advertising. You're right that there will existed generated content without these watermarks, but you can bet that all the commercial providers burning $$$$ on state of the art models will gradually coalesce around some means of widespread by-default/non-optional watermarking for content they let the public generate so that they can all avoid drowning in their own filth.

mortenjorck 11mo ago

Reminder that even in the hypothetical world where every AI image is digitally watermarked, and all cameras have a TPM that writes a hash of every photo to the blockchain, there’s nothing to stop you from pointing that perfectly-verified camera at a screen showing your perfectly-watermarked AI image and taking a picture. Image verification has never been easy. People have been airbrushed out of and pasted into photos for over a century; AI just makes it easier and more accessible. Expecting a “click to verify” workflow is unreasonable as it has ever been; only media literacy and a bit of legwork can accomplish this task.

fwip 11mo ago
Competent digital watermarks usually survive the 'analog hole'. Screen-cam resistant watermarks have been in use since at least 2020, and if memory serves, back to 2010 when I first starting reading about them, but I don't recall what it was called back then.
- simonw 11mo ago
  I just tried asking Gemini about a photo I took of my screen showing an image I edited with Nano Banana Pro... and it said "All or part of the content was generated with Google AI. SynthID detected in less than 25% of the image". Photo-of-a-screen: https://gemini.google.com/share/ab587bdcd03e https://gemini.google.com/share/ab587bdcd03e It reported 25-50% for the image without having been through that analog hole: https://gemini.google.com/share/022e486fd6bf https://gemini.google.com/share/022e486fd6bf
  - fwip 11mo ago
    Thanks for testing it!

zaidf 11mo ago

This is what C2PA is trying to do: https://c2pa.org/ https://c2pa.org/

losvedir 11mo ago

I'm sure Apple will roll something out in the coming years. Now that just anyone can easily AI themselves into a picture in front of the Eiffel tower, they'll want a feature that will let their users prove that they _really_ took that photo in front of the Eiffel tower (since to a lot of people sharing that you're on a Paris vacation is the point, more than the particular photo). I bet it will be called "Real Photos" or something like that, and the pictures will be signed by the camera hardware. Then iMessage will put a special border around it or something, so that when people share the photos with other Apple users they can prove that it was a real photo taken with their phone's camera.

pigpop 11mo ago
Does anyone other than you actually care about your vacation photos? There used to be a joke about people who did slideshows (on an actual slide projector) of their vacation photos at parties.
panarky 11mo ago
> a real photo taken with their phone's camera How "real" are iPhone photos? They're also computationally generated, not just the light that came through the lens. Even without any other post-processing, iPhones generate gibberish text when attempting to sharpen blurry images, they delete actual textures and replace them with smooth, smeared surfaces that look like a watercolor or oil paintings, and combine data from multiple frames to give dogs five legs.
- wyre 11mo ago
  Don’t be a pedant. You know very well there is a big different between a photo taken on an iPhone and a photo edited with Nano Banana.
omnimus 11mo ago
this already exists. its called 35mm film camera.
- infthi 11mo ago

vunderba 11mo ago

Regardless of how you feel about this kind of steganography, it seems clear that outside of a courtroom, deepfakes still have the potential to do massive damage. Unless the watermark randomly replaces objects in the scene with bananas, these images/videos will still spread like wildfire on platforms like TikTok, where the average netizen's idea of due diligence is checking for a six‑fingered hand... at best.

lazide 11mo ago

It solves a real problem - if you have something sketchy, the big players can repudiate it, the authorities can more formally define the black market, and we can have a ‘war on deepfakes’ to further enable the authorities in their attempts to control the narratives.

NoMoreNicksLeft 11mo ago

I don't believe that you can do this for photography. For AI-images, if the embedded data has enough information (model identification and random seed), one can prove that it was AI by recreating it on the fly and comparing. How do you prove that a photographic image was created by a CCD? If your AI-generated image were good enough to pass, then hacking hardware (or stealing some crypto key to sign it) would "prove" that it was a real photograph. Hell, it might even be possible for some arbitrary photographs to come up with an AI prompt that produces them or something similar enough to be indistinguishable to the human eye, opening up the possibility of "proving" something is fake even when it was actually real. What you want just can't work, not even from a theoretical or practical standpoint, let alone the other concerns mentioned in this thread.

gigel82 11mo ago

We need to be super careful with how legislation around this is passed and implemented. As it currently stands, I can totally see this as a backdoor to surveillance and government overreach. If social media platforms are required by law to categorize content as AI generated, this means they need to check with the public "AI generation" providers. And since there is no agreed upon (public) standard for imperceptible watermarks hashing that means the content (image, video, audio) in its entirety needs to be uploaded to the various providers to check if it's AI generated. Yes, it sounds crazy, but that's the plan; imagine every image you post on Facebook/X/Reddit/Whatsapp/whatever gets uploaded to Google / Microsoft / OpenAI / UnnamedGovernmentEntity / etc. to "check if it's AI". That's what the current law in Korea and the upcoming laws in California and EU (for August 2026) require :(

DenisM 11mo ago

It would be more productive for camera manufacturers to embed a per-device digital signature. Those care to prove their image is genuine could publish both pre and post processed images for transparency.

domoritz 11mo ago

I don't understand why there isn't an obvious, visible watermark at all. Yes, one could remove it but let's assume 95% of people don't bother removing the visible watermark. It would really help with seeing instantly when an image was AI generated.

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

benlivengood 11mo ago

You have to validate from the other direction. Let CCD sensors sign their outputs, and digital photo-editing produce a chain of custody with further signatures. Maybe zero knowledge proofs could provide anonymity, or a simple solution is to ship the same keys in every camera model, or let them use anonymous sim-style cards with N-month certificate validity. Not everyone needs to prove the veracity of their photos, but make it cheap enough and most people probably will by default.

smusamashah 11mo ago

This is what the SynthID signature looks like on Nano Banana images https://www.reddit.com/r/nanobanana/comments/1o1tvbm/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nanobanana/comments/1o1tvbm/ And if it can be seen like that, it should be removeable too. There are more examples in that thread.

frumiousirc 11mo ago
> more examples in that thread Some supposition: A Fourier amplitude image should show that pattern as peaks at a certain angle/radius location. The exact location may be part of the identification scheme. Running peak finding on the Fourier image and then zeroing out the frequencies in the peak should remove the pattern. Modeling the shape of the peak would allow mimicking the application of a legit SynthID signature. If anyone tries/tried this already, I'd love to see the results.

ethmarks 11mo ago

> now you're left with the bajillion other "grey market" models that won't give a damn about that. Exactly. When the barrier to entry for training a okay-ish AI model (not SOTA, obviously) is only a few thousand compute hours on H100s, you couldn't possibly hope to police the training of 100% of new models. Not to mention that lots of existing models are already out there are fully open-source. There will always be AI models that don't adhere to watermark regulations, especially if they were created a country that doesn't enforce your regulations. You can't hope to solve the problem of non-watermarked AI completely. And by solving it partially by mandating that the big AI labs add a unified watermark, you condition people to be even more susceptible to AI images because "if it was AI, it would have a watermark". It's truly a no-win situation.