TBF, I don't think the purpose of this watermark is to prevent bad people for passing AI as real. It would be a welcome side-effect but that's not why google wants this. Ultimately this is supposed to prevent AI training data from being contaminated with other AI generated content. You could imagine if the data set for training contains a million images generated with previous models having mangled fingers and crooked eyes, it would be hard to train a good AI out of that. Garbage in, garbage out.
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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So theoretically, those of us who put original images online could add this invisible watermark to make AI models leave our stuff out of their "steal this" pile?
Yea actually, that has a good "taste your own medecine" vibe
AI-generated images are becoming increasingly realistic, AI can't tell them apart anymore.
iirc AI models becoming worse after being trained with AI generated data is an actual issue right now. Even if we (or the AI) can't distinguish them from real images there are subtle differences that can be compounded into quite large differences if the AI is fed its own work over several generations and lead to a degraded output.
I’m not sure that’s the case. For instance, a lot of smaller local models leverage GPT4 to generate synthetic training data, which drastically improves the model’s output quality. The issue comes in when there is no QC on the model’s output. The same applies to Stable Diffusion.
Why it matters: It's become increasingly hard for people to distinguish between images made by humans and those generated by AI programs. Google and other tech giants have pledged to develop technical means to do so.
You don't need a watermark for good intentions. A bad actor doesn't put a watermark on it. A watermark may hurt because the broad mass will think "if there's no watermark, the image is real".
Spoiler - they will secretly have all humans in ai generated art have slightly messed up hands.
Mind blown!
says so in article:
The watermark is part of a larger effort by Google and other tech giants to develop ways to verify the authenticity of AI-generated images.
This is important because AI-generated images are becoming increasingly realistic, and it can be difficult to tell them apart from real images.
Its invisibility should really help all the laypeople see it clearly.