7 ms·

There'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

• j2kun 5mo ago
  Building 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 ago
      Especially as the open weight models are really generated by corporates, and they could stop releasing them at any time.
      • singpolyma3 5mo ago
        But we'd still have them. It's not like we're gaining much with new training anymore anyway
        • UqWBcuFx6NV4r 5mo ago
          I appreciate my coding agent being increasingly aware of the walrus operator :)
      • kridsdale1 5mo ago
        They also have built in dystopian government authority enforcement in them unless you go to pains to sever those neurons.
    • j2kun 5mo ago
      Fighting within the system is accepting the system.
  • huflungdung 5mo ago
    [dead]
  • transcriptase 5mo ago
    >due to the arms race that large corporate machines will win Much like how the entirety of Hollywood, book publishers, academic publishers, and game developers have won against piracy despite being some of the largest corps on earth and dedicating untold billions to the issue over the past 30 years?
    • SecretDreams 5mo ago
      Yes. Winning against piracy doesn't mean you completely eliminate piracy. It means you scare enough people into not doing it and make it a bit harder to do for others. Losing to piracy would see companies like Netflix and Spotify not thriving.
      • fc417fc802 5mo ago
        > It means you scare enough people into not doing it and make it a bit harder to do for others. By which definition they utterly failed. > Losing to piracy would see companies like Netflix and Spotify not thriving. Not at all. Netflix and Spotify do well because they are a good value proposition for the average customer. Piracy is free at point of "purchase" but is (and always has been) expensive in terms of various sorts of overhead.
        • black_knight 5mo ago
          As long as enough people keep the pirate bays open, it will be there as an alternative when the services start their inevitable enshittification. I for one do not enjoy the “Which service has the classic film I wanted to watch this week?” Nor having to switch services every time I want to see a new TV series. We need (and have!) similar “free” alternatives to the watermarked generative services. Just like I hate the yellow dots on my printed images, I am not happy to have my creative assets (I do nothing nefarious) stained with SynthID.
      • AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
        > Winning against piracy doesn't mean you completely eliminate piracy. But this is moving the goalposts. You can win against piracy either by making piracy less attractive or by making the paid offering more attractive. The first has utterly failed, piracy remains easy as a rule, and to the extent that they've succeeded it's not only disproportionately by doing the second thing, the DRM itself is a net negative because it has such a small effect on the ease of piracy while making the paid offering worse.
  • photios 5mo ago
    > No use messing with Google's watermark, fellas. Go do something else that's 100x harder instead. > works for Google Gee, I wonder why...
  • brookst 5mo ago
    This is the “instead of using seatbelts, we should invest in trains” argument.
    • j2kun 5mo ago
      It is the "instead of arguing about seatbelts, we should stop driving cars" argument.
  • victorbjorklund 5mo ago
    It doesn't make any sense at all. That's like saying browsing the internet with an ad blocker and other privacy tools is a tacit acceptance of tracking and ads, and that you should only visit websites that doesn't track or have ads.
    • j2kun 5mo ago
      Chrome is a great demonstration of my point here.
  • Dongyu_Jia 5mo ago
    [flagged]
  • nancyminusone 5mo ago
    Or you can just take a picture of your monitor with your phone.
  • ryanmcbride 5mo ago
    multiple things can be in line with the hacker ethos
• int0x29 5mo ago
  Accepting blindly destroying the concept of thruth should not be the hacker ethos either.
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  • 63stack 5mo ago
    Nobody said that?
    • int0x29 5mo ago
      Saying that watermarking fake things is bad kinda strongly implies it
      • deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
  • bonoboTP 5mo ago
    It's already possible to lie with text. Pixels are pixels. If we can't blindly believe pixels to show the truth, we will be simply back to the pre-photography era which managed to have a concept of truth regardless.
    • BoredPositron 5mo ago
      When could you ever trust pixels?
      • onetokeoverthe 5mo ago
        [dead]
      • the_af 5mo ago
        You and I did whenever we assumed the pixels were an upload of a digitized photo taken with an actual camera of, say, a historical event, or something in nature (e.g. some rare bird), a birthday party, etc. The photo could be staged (e.g. Cottingley Fairies), it could be altered physically (like cutting or painting over, e.g. Stalin), it could be cropped intentionally to tell a different story (plenty of examples), and more recently it could be photoshopped, etc. All of these were possible, though harder than it is now, but let's not pretend we didn't "trust pixels". We all did, just as we trusted newspaper photographs. Now that era must come to a firm end, and I believe it's a tragedy.
• croes 5mo ago
  Do we care about truth? Without truth freedom and privacy are endangered too. The other comment talks about laws that can already handle that. How if images, video and audio aren’t reliable proof anymore?
  • eikenberry 5mo ago
    The watermarking should be on those things we want to verify as something that was not generated or manipulated. Something you'd add to, for instance, cameras. Putting them on the generated/manipulated is backwards as you can never get every model to watermark.
    • amarant 5mo ago
      That model is equally bad though. Given that you're writing this in a discussion about gen AI watermarks, how in the world did you come up with the idea that Gen AI wouldn't be able to add a watermark?
      • Woansdei 5mo ago
        Perhaps not watermarks, but cameras could sign their pictures and put it in the extra data, that's not something that would be easy to add to fake pictures, or at least not the correct signature.
      • eikenberry 5mo ago
        Not that they "wouldn't be able".. that they wouldn't do it. For Gen AI watermarks to be useful all Gen AI systems need to add them and the incentives aren't there for that to happen. On the other hand the incentives are there for the non-generated sources to add it so they can differentiate themselves from the Gen AI media.
  • streetfighter64 5mo ago
    I think you'll have to clarify the cause and effect of that a bit. Also note that people have been falling for obviously watermarked videos already. And even if they weren't, wouldn't that just make them more gullible towards non-watermarked models?
• NotMichaelBay 5mo ago
  I'm pretty sure watermarking is (or soon will be) a requirement for AI generated images in software used in the EU, as part of their regulations for AI transparency.
  • transcriptase 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    • UqWBcuFx6NV4r 5mo ago
      If i had a dollar for every time an American cried about literally any non-US jurisdiction having an iota of effect on them I could quit my job and leave this terrible website forever.
      • transcriptase 5mo ago
        [flagged]
• DonsDiscountGas 5mo ago
  It's not "every digital move" it's the photos you ask them to create. If you care about privacy use a local model
• wang_li 5mo ago
  The human ethos should be to never be misleading about the origin and truth of any content you create, forward, or pass on. If we care about honesty we should jail anyone who does so.
• totetsu 5mo ago
  Its what happens when people in power are paranoid dark-triad types and want to be able to catch anyone who threatens their power and stick it to them..
  • randycupertino 5mo ago
    It already happened with Trump claiming any unfavorable content of his administration is "AI-generated" as a defense to dismiss real, unedited media. He literally said, “If something happens that’s really bad, maybe I’ll have to just blame AI.” ie the video of garbage being thrown out the windows that his team already confirmed was real: https://www.kptv.com/2025/09/03/trump-says-video-showing-items-thrown-white-house-is-ai-after-his-team-indicates-its-real/ https://www.kptv.com/2025/09/03/trump-says-video-showing-ite... Also the Lincoln Project video footage him him stumbling while walking and over his words: https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/12/04/donald-trump-falsely-claims-attack-ad-used-ai-to-make-him-look-bad/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/12/04/donald-tru...
  • keybored 5mo ago
    When.
• KaiserPro 5mo ago
  "we care about privacy" Yes, yes I do. but I also live in a society that requires trust to function. making a tool the obliterates that trust(genAI imagery pipelines) then creating a tool that makes it trivial for normal people to remove any hint of controls over said trust eroding system is, toxic. I get the argument about not putting in fingerprints that identify users, Good I agree. But this also removes the things that identify this as an AI image. Now, what are the legitimate uses of that? No really, why would I _need_ to remove a watermark for _legitimate_ purposes? Assuming that watermark is generic, rather than a fingerprint of a specific person
  • AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
    > No really, why would I _need_ to remove a watermark for _legitimate_ purposes? When removing the watermark is easy, a very legitimate purpose of making the code to do it publicly available is to make a public demonstration that it's easy to do. As for content use cases, suppose someone is using AI to modify their appearance because they're being unjustly targeted by an oppressive government. That government naturally bans doing that because they want to be able to identify and arrest their critics, so now if you make videos with your real face you get arrested but if you use a generated avatar then the watermark enables automated censorship because the government orders anything with the watermark to have its reach automatically restricted.
    • KaiserPro 5mo ago
      > suppose someone is using AI to modify their appearance because they're being unjustly targeted by an oppressive government Then use a mask like everyone else. digital mask, one that obscures. which is my main point, no, there isn't a legitimate need. realtime avatars don't generally have invisible watermarks, also they are running from your machine, otherwise you've got a (normally credit card) trail to your front door. plus a video stream also if you are generating stuff from a public provider, then tracing people isn't that hard to do.
      • amanaplanacanal 5mo ago
• blablabla123 5mo ago
  The Hacker ethos is mainly about how things work: sharing, openness. I'm not entirely sure how hiding that something is GenAI fits in here. It surely doesn't have anything to do with Privacy though.
  • bawolff 5mo ago
    I disagree. Its mainly about having technical control and freedom. Reverse engineering how things work feels like peak hacker ethos. You don't have control of something if you can't remove it. I think ethical considerations were always a bit secondary to technical power when it came to so called "hacker ethos". After all, instructions on how to remove watermarks definitely feels like the sort of thing that would have been in phrack back in the day.
    • blablabla123 5mo ago
      There's a thing called Hacker ethic which used to be referenced quite frequently in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic Probably it's worth reminding of also considering we're on HN here... ;)
      • bawolff 5mo ago
        Well, to quote from the article > Hackers believe that essential lessons can be learned about the systems—about the world—from taking things apart, seeing how they work, and using this knowledge to create new and more interesting things. > Access to computers—and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works—should be unlimited and total. > Mistrust authority—promote decentralization > All information should be free I phrased it a bit differently, and perhaps a little less sympathetically, but i think i was more or less saying the same thing. In any case a tool like the article that strips watermarks seems exactly the sort of thing that would fit into what i quoted above. Its mistrusting authority - there is nothing more central authority then having a literal central authority adding hard to remove digital signatures to images. It promotes freedom of information - it supports explaining how watermarks work and what they are. Its fundamentally taking apart a system, which teaches us how the system works.
• windsurfer 5mo ago
  Even if you remove a watermark, the companies still have a record of which images they have generated and for whom. Even if you remove the obvious watermarks, all major image generators are using steganography to embed hidden information that you can't be sure were removed. This is a type of one-sided arms race where one player gets to be invisible if they want to.
  • swingboy 5mo ago
    Do they still work if you apply something like a filter or additional layers on top? Or add a subtle blur, etc.
    • windsurfer 5mo ago
      Yes usually, since an important aspect of steganography is error correction. For example we know that SynthID is robust enough to survive resizing and small blurs.