Hacker News

81 points by janalsncm 3 hours ago | 58 comments

akersten 2 hours ago

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 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

j2kun 2 hours 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 2 hours 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.

NotMichaelBay 34 minutes 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.

int0x29 2 hours ago

Accepting blindly destroying the concept of thruth should not be the hacker ethos either.

jameson 38 minutes ago

It's best for privacy not to do this in the first place because:

- Watermarks are optional by AI provider so bad actors will circumvent by using another provider

- GH project proves watermarks can be removed

Given these, trying to ensure "truth" is a futile effort unfortunately, and watermarking only gives companies advantage to violate privacy

bonoboTP 2 hours 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.

tptacek 2 hours ago

It either works reliably or it doesn't; if it doesn't, it's better that everybody be clear about that.

xp84 2 hours ago

Fair enough. While I would kind of wish AI could be reliably detected, deep down I know this is impossible and it would be pretty bad if we had, say, a prosecution that succeeded because "this 'provably-non-AI' photo places you at the scene of the crime" because only a few underground people know how to remove a watermark.

63stack 2 hours ago

Nobody said that?

int0x29 2 hours ago

Saying that watermarking fake things is bad kinda strongly implies it

15155 2 hours ago

Stalin had no issues photoshopping images almost 100 years ago.

int0x29 2 hours ago

Generating realistic video of arbitrary things and people at scale is quite a bit of a different game than retouching photos

tredre3 2 hours ago

Stalin had all the resources imaginables at his disposal.

Now Nancy, a tech-phobic waitress who has a grudge against her coworker can make up an entire scenario with one prompt and her colleagues might blindly believe her.

Let's not pretend they're the same thing.

Gen AI is inevitable. Watermarking is likely futile. But in my opinion it is still very important to discuss how, as a society, we're going to live in a post-truth world now that anybody can, IN SECONDS, not only fabricate a story but also spread it to thousands of people through their social media.

nomel 2 hours ago

Simple, don't trust what you see on the internet, which has been a constant since the mid 90's when it was invented.

xp84 43 minutes ago

When that idea was originated, the advice was more like:

"Don't trust what you see on the Internet. Trust instead what you read in a reputable daily newspaper, or Peter Jennings or Tom Brokaw on the nightly news, or BBC World News."

Today, the Internet, especially the part which is not trustable, has nearly finished killing most of the "trustworthy" news sources, by outcompeting them for ad dollars - by being way better at targeting ads (e.g. Meta) and by scientifically perfecting addiction (e.g. TikTok). What remains is mostly controlled by governments and has far from a perfect record of being fact-based and impartial.[1] There are a ton of independent people out there in good faith posting facts on the Internet, but we just agreed that we shouldn't trust what we see on the Internet.

So doesn't this become "Don't trust anything"? And doesn't that, in practice, get implemented as "Don't trust anything that challenges what you believe to be true"? This feels like a really, really bad change to our society - and I'd argue it's already completely happened.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/bbc-gaza-documentary-hamas-sancti...

15155 58 minutes ago

People will just become numb to images and video and trust nothing: this is already happening.

xp84 42 minutes ago

Yes, it's happened. Except a lot of people do have an exception - they'll trust the slop that reinforces their existing biases, or even if they know in their hearts it's not true, viewing their side's lies regularly still has an effect on the way they think.

xp84 51 minutes ago

Good point. Sometimes I wonder if social media, just almost every aspect of it, is the real cancer. Allowing just about anyone (globally) to anonymously deploy information warfare via the social media vector just seems bound to have horrible outcomes. It's just as bad with text as with images or video. Because of social media, we've trained at least 3 separate generations to self-sort into camps with customized ideological info sources that have incredibly-low standards for fact-checking and every incentive to tell their audience (1) exactly what they want and (2) whatever will enrage them most.

AI kind of makes this worse, but also only barely. Because most people really ought to know by now that almost any content could be AI, a video of, say, Trump kicking a baby or violating a goat wouldn't convince anyone that those acts happened (unless they already believed they happened).

Thing is, we're so flooded in biased BS, and no one has any incentive to produce non-sensational, factual news. I absolutely see 'post-truth' as the inevitability. You can't "weed a garden" when it is 100% weeds. The term "news" will cease to mean facts, and just become a branch of entertainment. Kind of the way "Reality TV" went from being supposedly a documentary (e.g. COPS) to just being a flavor of entertainment, where nothing needs to be real.

croes 2 hours ago

A good example why fake images are bad.

Do you want to make it easier for the next Stalin?

15155 59 minutes ago

The genie has been out of the bottle for 100 years, it's delusional to think that some voluntary watermark is going to stop that.

In reality, all images will cease to be trustworthy and there's nothing that can be done about this.

streetfighter64 2 hours ago

The concept of truth? A bit overblown don't you think? Because some guy can make a realistic looking fake videos that destroys the "concept" of truth? How?

croes 2 hours 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?

mywacaday 50 minutes ago

Maybe we do care about truth, freedom and privacy but the majority of rest of society will happily accept any T&Cs just to get access to whatever the next digital sliced pan is and as for truth and accountability, if they were two sides of the same coin on the ground people wouldn't bend down to pick it up as possesing it looks too much like responsibility and inconvenience.

eikenberry 57 minutes 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 47 minutes 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?

streetfighter64 54 minutes 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?

site-packages1 2 hours ago

I don't know I really like the definitive indicator that something is AI so I can completely ignore anything else that comes from them.

recursive 2 hours ago

If someone's doing something you don't like, you can't really count on them doing it the way you prefer.

streetfighter64 38 minutes ago

You 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.

sgarman 2 hours ago

I think the issue is it was never definitive. This is a great way to show people that.

esafak 2 hours ago

I have not read anyone claim that SynthID had a false alarm issue, so if it returned positive I would believe it is synthetic.

Wacari 52 minutes ago

it does have a false negative issue

Tiberium 2 hours ago

This 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 2 hours ago

Nano 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 2 hours ago

Where 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#gener...

ls612 2 hours ago

Is SDXL still the best local image model all these years later? Damn, that’s sad…

vunderba 46 minutes ago

With the number of fine-tuned LoRAs and checkpoints - from a realism standpoint, yes SDXL is still very viable. From a prompt adherency perspective, absolutely not.

Qwen-Image-2512 / Z-Image / Flux.2 absolutely crush SDXL if you're actually generating moderately complex scenes.

ls612 38 minutes ago

Do you still need a wacky backend to run them locally or does LM Studio make it easy nowadays? Last I use a local diffusion model was late 2022.

j2kun 2 hours 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 2 hours ago

I 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 2 hours ago

Ignoring 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 2 hours ago

So 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 2 hours ago

I had to think about it, how about if the claim were:

If you take a photograph that is misidentified as AI generated, you can “preserve the historical record“ by using this tool before publishing the image.

(Anyone know the false positive rate with watermark IDs, would’ve hoped it’s like zero)

yalogin 22 minutes ago

This is brilliant pace. What I expected to see

redox99 49 minutes ago

There's quite a bit of difference in the before and after. I hope they can find a way that better preserves details.

airstrike 2 hours ago

Regardless 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 2 hours ago

Pretty 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 50 minutes ago

There'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?

a-dub 2 hours ago

watermarking 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.

sscaryterry 2 hours ago

Yin and yang.

gbraad 2 hours ago

I 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 38 minutes ago

Yes, I came from that thread and figured this kind of tool was worth mentioning.

tamimio 2 hours ago

Amaze amaze amaze

- Rocky

grebc 2 hours ago

What’s wrong with showing off AI bro? Why the shame?

Barbing 2 hours ago

People 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 45 minutes ago

You'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 36 minutes ago

So letting people know you’ve used AI is not a good thing? Best used in covert is what you’re saying?