Just because something isn't perfect doesn't mean it's not useful. I've already seen posts online that were able to be proven as falsified because someone ran the images through Google for SynthID checks.
> How old is photoshop and why is it exempt?
For one, it's not developed by Google or OpenAI. The barrier to entry to making realistic but deceptive images with Photoshop is far higher than with AI, and there are already techniques that can, imperfectly, be used to detect the use of traditional image editing.
So 999 people that are just making an image need to be DRM'ed so that you might catch the 1 person making "realistic but deceptive" images... like this is some kind of special case of ... internet images.
This isn't DRM right? This is metadata attached to the image that makes it clear it was synthetically generated. The public has a huge incentive to know when images are AI generated and the harm to legitimate users seems pretty small: aka someone might complain online that you use AI
Not yet, but it is easy to imagine many ways it would be used for DRM.
billions? of "fake" images not generated by ai but just photoshopped and ... not really harmful.
There is no case that any of its particularly harmful outside of things like CSAM which is illegal.
Have you looked at twitter or Facebook and seen the swaths of our population that are just fully believing fake AI slop about politics, crime, etc?
I mean I see a lot of images online where people forget or don't care enough to remove/crop the Gemini watermark.
I guarantee this works poorly, at best.
If this actually works solidly, Google is in deep, deep, deep shit. It would mean that I can put a mark on my non-AI videos and demand that Google not allow upload of my identifiably copyrighted content.
This would completely obliterate YouTube.
No, it wouldn't. ContentID is already used by Google for that exact purpose. They appear to be fully in favor of enforcing IP law provided the owning party raises a complaint.
ContentID is generated internally by Google and you have to qualify (aka be able to threaten Google with lawyers) in order to effectively participate. It also seems to be defeatable by such advanced techniques as flipping the video left to right.
If SynthID works, this would allow people to tag their own videos with a watermark that is invariant across various levels of compression and editing. It would enable automated scanning of YouTube videos for uploads and the consequent class-action lawsuits.
Because of that, I can fairly confidently say that this doesn't work. However, it will function to divert some attention for a while. And that's what Google and OpenAI intended in the first place.