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Remove-AI-Watermarks – CLI and library for removing AI watermarks from images
- cush 5mo agoI love that this is exactly one position above OpenAI Adopts SynthID Watermarks
- site-packages1 5mo agoI don't know I really like the definitive indicator that something is AI so I can completely ignore anything else that comes from them.
- sgarman 5mo agoI think the issue is it was never definitive. This is a great way to show people that.
- esafak 5mo agoI have not read anyone claim that SynthID had a false alarm issue, so if it returned positive I would believe it is synthetic.
- Wacari 5mo agoit does have a false negative issue
- esafak 5mo agoAn issue this tool exacerbates. Labeling AI output is a good thing.
- subscribed 5mo agoWithout the tool trust into Ai generated misinformation is higher.
- esafak 5mo agoPrecisely the opposite. This tool weakens the reliability of SynthID.
- Retr0id 5mo agoYou can trivially false-flag any image by uploading it to gemini and asking it to return it as-is
- free_bip 5mo agoThat's not what the previous comment is referring to. They're referring to false positives, i.e "Gemini did not generate this (or process it) yet it says SynthID confirmed"
- wincy 5mo agoSo imagine the damage you could do to an artist by having Gemini flag it then saying “see here’s the proof they’re using AI art!” That person would get eaten alive.
- msy 5mo ago...except they can produce the same image without the fake SynthID.
- black_knight 5mo agoThey must have used the tool from TFA!
- recursive 5mo agoIf someone's doing something you don't like, you can't really count on them doing it the way you prefer.
- streetfighter64 5mo agoYou can count on them doing it in a way that's economical for them. It's how email spam filters and ad blockers work. Sure somebody will always find a way to bypass it, and that's the arms race. A filter with zero false positives that removes 80% of slop is pretty darn good though.
- spike021 5mo agoAre markers being removed here the same or similar to ones tools might add if you use an AI tool just to edit a photo? like a more complicated object removal in a photo editor?
- cortesoft 5mo agoI feel like it is even worse if we have a marker that is ALMOST always present on AI images. It would make us more likely to be fooled by an AI image that had them removed, because we would trust the marker.
- Tiberium 5mo agoThis is a bit misleading as for Gemini it only properly removes the visible watermark. To remove SynthID it has to regenerate the image at low noise with SDXL, which will likely destroy a lot of small details, plus won't work for higher res properly (NB2 and GPT Image 2 support up to 4K image outputs)
- gpt5 5mo agoNano Banana 2 only supports 1K resolution (1024x1024) natively. Anything above that is upscaling. So this matches SDXL. GPT Image 2 does support 4k natively (but experimentally).
- vunderba 5mo agoWhere did you get that info from? According to Google's own docs as well as my own image generation tests via the API, it supports up to 4K natively for gemini-3.1-flash-image-preview (aka NB2). It just defaults to 1K. But I didn't see anything in the docs stating that it's just a simple upscale for larger resolutions. https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/image-generation#generate-4k-images https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/image-generation#gener...
- gpt5 5mo agoFrom: https://aistudio.google.com/models/gemini-3-pro-image https://aistudio.google.com/models/gemini-3-pro-image > Produce production-ready assets with native 1K output and built-in upscaling to 2K and 4K resolutions The API doc you linked is misleading.
- vunderba 5mo agoYeah - if that's true then it's even worse because the output price says $0.067 per 1K image*, $0.101 per 2K image*, and $0.151 per 4K image*. But if all the "compute time" is spent on a 1K image and they're just passing it to a ESRGAN or other upscaling technique, then there’s literally zero reason to generate anything above 1K. Just save the money and upscale it yourself.
- j2kun 5mo ago> Use cases where the threat model fits: You are preserving art or historical record against false-positive "AI-generated" labels. Sorry, how does using AI to generate images have anything to do with this? Image generators cannot insert watermarks into things they did not generate, and it seems highly unlikely that you will get a false-positive watermark on human-generated art, especially if, as the readme says, these watermarks have high enough fidelity to trace to a specific session id. Plus the modifications to the image needed to erase watermarks would necessarily change the thing being "preserved." [edit]: the more I read the more I'm convinced, the claimed use cases in the README are bullshit and the real reason is to provide a tool that helps people bypass "AI-generated" labels on social media for AI slop.
- Tiberium 5mo agoI mostly agree about the justification in the repo being wrong, but wanted to engage about this point: > Image generators cannot insert watermarks into things they did not generate It's actually very easy to take a real image, ask Gemini/ChatGPT to modify some tiny part of it (could be something as silly as lighting/shadow/etc), and often the resulting image will be detected by their watermarking tools. This way you can easily present any real image as AI-generated.
- j2kun 5mo agoIgnoring that a watermark removal tool does not help with this threat model, the claim is still true: the original image can not be changed, and instead a copy is created.
- rezonant 5mo agoSo what? I can also open an image in Photoshop and make sure it saves out some Photoshop specific EXIF data and try to claim the image was doctored. What I can't do is go and put my deceptive altered file up in place of the original in all the places on the Internet it exists.
- Barbing 5mo ago
- akersten 5mo agoThere's an underappreciated comment in the other thread about SynthID and OpenAI [0] that captures what (IMO) the hacker ethos on this should be. We care about privacy, we should not accept tools that barcode our every digital move. (note that the counter of "well, they don't do that yet" is not particularly convincing) [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48200060 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48200060
- j2kun 5mo agoBuilding a tool that tries (and probably fails) to remove the watermark (due to the arms race that large corporate machines will win) is tacitly accepting the barcode. The hacker ethos should be, first and foremost, to run open source models locally without relying on a corporation.
- akersten 5mo ago> [fighting against the system] is tacitly accepting the barcode. I don't really see it. I think it's important to win on both fronts.
- gpt5 5mo agoEspecially as the open weight models are really generated by corporates, and they could stop releasing them at any time.
- singpolyma3 5mo agoBut we'd still have them. It's not like we're gaining much with new training anymore anyway
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 5mo agoI appreciate my coding agent being increasingly aware of the walrus operator :)
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- grebc 5mo agoWhat’s wrong with showing off AI bro? Why the shame?
- Barbing 5mo agoPeople don’t realize how hard it can be to throw an election or impugn an adversary with manipulated imagery Then they ask us to do it by hand?!
- streetfighter64 5mo agoYou're assigning emotions to people based on what you'd like them to feel, not on reality. For example, most americans probably don't feel shame about being american. But it's still a good decision not to go around showing off a bunch of american flags abroad, unless you want people to look at you in a certain way.
- grebc 5mo agoSo letting people know you’ve used AI is not a good thing? Best used in covert is what you’re saying?
- userbinator 5mo agoSome people are just biased to the point that telling them something is AI when it's actually not will cause them to convince themselves such: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/real-monet-ai-chaos https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/real-monet-ai-c...
- bblb 5mo agoInteresting. And now this not-AI-generated-actually-real-cropped-Monet-AI-joke has been sold to an AI art collector for 40k. https://x.com/SHL0MS/status/2055281312697647223 https://x.com/SHL0MS/status/2055281312697647223
- 5mo ago
- sscaryterry 5mo agoYin and yang.
- tamimio 5mo agoAmaze amaze amaze - Rocky
- gbraad 5mo agoI just saw the announcement about OpenAI or so going to use SynthID and all I thought was; what can d be read(located) can be removed. Seems the tool already exists, proving my point.
- janalsncm 5mo agoYes, I came from that thread and figured this kind of tool was worth mentioning.
- airstrike 5mo agoRegardless of one's opinion about this particular project, it seems obvious to me that the path forward is proving authenticity of non-AI resources rather than attempting to watermark all the AI-generated ones.
- xp84 5mo agoPretty hard problem to tackle when you can point an "authenticated" camera at a really nice screen and snap a 'definitely real' photo of anything a screen can display :(
- streetfighter64 5mo agoThere's probably a technical solution, such as the camera manufacturer cryptographically signing a GPS location and timestamp together with the pixels. Like all DRM it will probably be broken though, and more importantly, would anyone (even e.g. a newspaper editor) care enough to verify the signature?
- baby_souffle 5mo agoSpoofing GPS timing signals isn't as hard as it used to be. If you know what you're looking for on AliExpress you can get all the equipment you need
- goatlover 5mo agoHow about a quantum digital signature?
- xp84 5mo agoGPS? No problem, they can take their hi-DPI monitor and their secure camera to the sidewalk in front of the White House lawn and play the AI video they made of soldiers shooting protestors.
- dabinat 5mo agoIsn’t the goal only to prove that a photograph was taken with a particular camera? I don’t think you could ever prove that the subject was legitimate, as there are countless ways to misrepresent things. But in a world of AI slop, knowing a photo was taken on a real camera and wasn’t synthesized artificially is still a useful data point in determining trust.
- a-dub 5mo agowatermarking only really works when the scheme is secret. putting cyphertext in high frequency noise is old news. in generative land would be far more interesting to use the generative flexibility to encode in macrostructure.
- redox99 5mo agoThere's quite a bit of difference in the before and after. I hope they can find a way that better preserves details.
- doctorpangloss 5mo agopeople like the idea of removing watermarks. it doesn't have to remove a watermark. do you get it? this whole product is meaningless vibes.
- yalogin 5mo agoThis is brilliant pace. What I expected to see
- UrbanNorminal 5mo agoCan't we instead just use open source models?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- b3ing 5mo agoWatermarking images generated from trained data on stolen copyrighted material, I get why so they can try to tell if something is real or not but something seems wrong
- andrew_kwak 5mo ago[dead]
- dostick 5mo agoTo remove Gemini watermark, open dev tools and block http request to watermark. It is overlaying logo in client.
- 8cvor6j844qw_d6 5mo agoAre there tools to apply SynthID to existing images? e.g., make AI watermarks unreliable for those relying on it
- jamwise 5mo agoYeah, human minds need an security patch for firehosing
- digitaltrees 5mo agoWhy? Don’t do this. Society is built on an implicit assumption of trust. You will erode the foundation that enables any success you might have in the short term.
- xorgun 5mo ago[dead]
- vasco 5mo agoHow is a hidden watermark that only police and providers can read better than a hidden watermark that the people can also read if they go out of their way to setup some project like this? Also your argument makes zero sense because bad guys will do this anyway. At least there's also an open source project for normal people, and it's interesting from a stenography standpoint.
- digitaltrees 5mo agoWatermarks exists to create a chain of custody or attribution that can be used to establish culpability. Just like the government requires printer companies to add a dot matrix watermark to printed pages to prevent currency forgery. Making untraceable assets means parties can’t be held liable for harms. Just because a bad actor might poison a toddler doesn’t mean you should sell them the arsenic. Just because the effects of arsenic on the neurons of a brain are interesting means you should feed them to a toddler and watch the effects unfold. I support the legal freedom to pursue any idea, but we should also mentor our colleagues about the consequences of our projects and avoid unnecessary harm.
- vasco 5mo agoWhat is it with people that take your position that they always need to bring children to the discussion? Where's the watermark in an IKEA knife?
- digitaltrees 5mo ago
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- northernsausage 5mo agoAs a photographer I say "down with this sort of thing"
- subscribed 5mo agoGood. Better than only known bad actors doing this with the public wrongly believing watermarks are reliable.
- steve1977 5mo agoI think AI watermarks are kind of a lost cause anyway. I'd be more interested in some kind of trusted Non-AI watermark. This is something that could get integrated into cameras for example. However, considering how much AI-processing we already have in "normal" photos, it will be difficult to decide where to draw the line.
- frotaur 5mo agoThat would be great, but I always wonder: how do you prevent people from photographing an AI generating image through the 'legitimizing' camera?
- steve1977 5mo agoMaybe LIDAR or IR focus could help with that. But then again, the photo itself would be authentic in this case strictly speaking. It's not an easy problem. If I had a good solution, I would have tried to monetize it already ;)
- febed 5mo agoSince it seems like you would know, could it also work with Non AI static watermarks like repeating oblique lines?
- Tacite 5mo agoDidn't work at all for me. Hive Moderation still shows "gemini3: 99.9%". Tried their online version and it went from gemini3: 99.9% to midjourney: 64.7% + stablediffusionxl: 16.1%.
- Planktonne 5mo agoI find the casual malevolence of this kind of thing breathtaking. Every time someone raises potential issues with AI misuse, they're dismissed as fear-mongering while a host of people immediately rush to demonstrate that not only is the fear justified, it's gleefully anticipated under the vaguest colour of lofty ideals. People want to dismiss the potential harms of deepfakes while also excitedly releasing the deepfake-hider-3000 and saying they just really, really care about privacy (for people who make deepfakes).
- b65e8bee43c2ed0 5mo agothe genie is out of the bottle. the sooner you let go of the notion that it can be kvetched out of existence the less frustrated you'll feel. for example, 35 years ago PGP was a "casually malevolent" thing, enabling terrorists and pedophiles to email each other with impunity. the effort to make math illegal had (very predictably) failed and now we have encryption everywhere. did the world end? how do you feel about Chat Control and numerous other initiatives to roll it all back?
- Planktonne 5mo agoThat argument is a lot less convincing (and sincere) when we're talking about a specific tool with a very specific purpose, rather than maths itself. In much the same way, you can make pro-gun arguments based on sport shooting, but not when you're holding a landmine. This is a very specific tool with the purpose of making it easier to lie, in an area where the kinds of lies people tell are directly injurious to society. "It's just math" doesn't fly here, and all the primary uses for such a tool are malevolent.
- b65e8bee43c2ed0 5mo agothe genie I was talking about was AI itself, not this particular tool, to address your point about "AI misuse". I should've made that clearer, sorry. as for the rest of it: would banning a tool that breaks ROT13 make ROT13-encrypted communications safe?
- jappgar 5mo agodoing the devil's work here.
- __MatrixMan__ 5mo agoTrusting your adversary to reliably identify themselves is folly. We need to get to a place where we're checking digital signatures to see which humans were involved in the creation of something, and ignoring everything else.
- ShreyashM17 5mo agoIsn't this wrong? like removing AI watermarks, people like make morphed images using AI, and then use something like this, and claim it to be real
- eleventen 5mo agoHow you use the tool matters, yes. But the freedom to demonstrate and understand this weakness with watermarks is much more important to exercise than saying "shhhhh don't tell people about this". The takeaway should be that watermarks aren't very reliable and you should keep your guard up anyway.
- ShreyashM17 5mo agoI think we can find out a way where these watermark, becomes too difficult to remove
- deadbabe 5mo agoWhat happens to watermarks when you turn images to videos on other platforms? Does every frame carry the original mark?
- asdfkjasdf 5mo ago[dead]
- madrox 5mo agoFor better or worse, I think the future has to be showing warnings on images with no C2PA-like watermarking like we do for insecure web sites. Media can be signed by authors. If the Associated Press sign an image, I can feel more confidence in its authenticity than the next decade's InfoWars. Power users can still choose to ignore it, but standardizing UX around trust sources like we do TLS will save the less savvy among us. I don't think we've even seen the full brutal force of disinformation that we are capable of yet.
- yangqing 5mo ago[flagged]