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Inserting an undetectable 1-bit watermark into a multi megapixel image is not particularly difficult.
If you assume competence from Google, they probably have two different watermarks. A sloppy one they offer an online oracle for and one they keep in reserve for themselves (and law enforcement requests).
Also given that it's Google we are dealing with here, they probably save every single image generated (or at least its neural hash) and tie it to your account in their database.
The dual-watermark theory makes alot of sense for defensive engineering. You always assume your outer layer will be broken and so keep a second layer that isn't publicly testable. Same as defence in depth anywhere else. I'm curious - as new models are being built constantly and they're naturally non-deterministic, do you think it's possible for end users to prove that?
> I'm curious - as new models are being built constantly and they're naturally non-deterministic, do you think it's possible for end users to prove that?
How is the model relevant? The models are proprietary and you never see any of its outputs that haven't been watermarked.
Seems like a very low-quality AI-assisted research repo, and it doesn't even properly test against Google's own SynthID detector. It's not hard at all (with some LLM assistance, for example) to reverse-engineer network requests to be able to do SynthID detection without a browser instance or Gemini access, and then you'd have a ground truth.
I read a lot of comments on HN that say something is not hard, yet don't provide a POC of their own or link to research they have knowledge of.
I also read a lot of comments on HN that start by attacking the source of the information, such as saying it was AI assisted, instead of the actual merits of the work.
The HN community is becoming curmudgeonly and using AI tooling as the justification.
That's how life generally works. If your friend tells you, "I went to that new movie yesterday. It was very boring, I fell asleep midway." - then you either listen to his advice or don't. You don't ask your friend if they ever made a movie of their own.. And you don't ask for a 3rd party research of that movie's either.
As for AI specifically.. life is too short to read all the interesting pages already, and AI just makes is so much worse.
- AI is verbose in general, so you are spending a lot of time reading and not getting much new facts out of that.
- Heavy AI use often means that author has little idea about the topic themselves, and thus cannot engage in comments. Since discussion with authors are often most interesting part of HN, that makes submission less interesting.
And yes, it is possible to use AI assistance to create nice and concise report on the topics you can happily talk about, but then this would not be labeled as "AI".
becoming? under most posts that even in passing mention using AI tools there are multiple people raising their noses talking about how much they hate AI use
It says not to use these tools to misrepresent AI-generated content as human-created. But the project is a watermark removal tool with a pip-installable CLI and strength settings named "aggressive" and "maximum." Calling this research while shipping turnkey watermark stripping is trying to have it both ways in a way that's uncomfortable to read.
The README itself reads like unedited AI output with several layers of history baked in.
- V1 and V2 appear in tables and diagrams but are never explained. V3 gets a pipeline diagram that hand-waves its fallback path.
- The same information is restated three times across Overview, Architecture, and Technical Deep Dive. ~1600 words padded to feel like a paper without the rigor.
- Five badges, 4 made up, for a project with 88 test images, no CI, and no test suite. "Detection Rate: 90%" has no methodology behind it. "License: Research" links nowhere and isn't a license.
- No before/after images, anywhere, for a project whose core claim is imperceptible modification.
- Code examples use two different import styles. One will throw an ImportError.
- No versioning. If Google changes SynthID tomorrow, nothing tells you the codebook is stale.
The underlying observations about resolution-dependent carriers and cross-image phase consistency are interesting. The packaging undermines them.
Agreed. This isn't punk this just helps the bad guys. Society needs to know what content is AI generated and what is not.
This was never going to be a reliable way to do it. It's basically the evil bit . It only works for as long as everyone is making a good-faith effort to follow the convention. But the bad guys do not do that.
It really doesn't need such capability. Nor does it need the capability to know what human generated it either.
If that's the case, society will inevitably be disappointed.
There are already ten million AI image generators, the overwhelming majority of which do not watermark their outputs. Google auto-inserting them is nice, but ultimately this kind of tool to remove them will inevitably be widespread.
Okay... this tests its own ability to remove the watermark against its own detector. It doesn't test against Gemini's SynthID app. So it does nothing...
SynthID is visible in some generations (areas with a lot of edges, or text), I wonder if this would make them look better.
And it gets more and more visible in every edit if you use Nano Banana for the edits.
Im confident i saw the watermark in use today, in nano banana, i copied the image from chrome into slack. the resulting upload was a black square with a red dot. and not the image i had generated.
I remember experiencing something similar. But then iirc I noticed you can draw on a screenshot and I think i was copying the random dots I made by accidental clicks... You sure it wasnt this?
Ok i get that eventually someone was gonna do this but why would we want to purposely remove one of the only ways of detecting if an image is ai generated or not...?
Because an attacker will do that the same thing and without sharing that knowledge good actors are in the dark. It's the same reason we share known security problems, since there will be bad actors that discover the same bugs and use them for much worse.
It was always going to be available to some people, but not everyone would know or believe that. Now they will.
Much like every other thing in the tech world. He'll, it's why AI will kill us off eventually.
If a system depends on every person on the planet not doing one particular thing or the system breaks, expect the system to break quickly.
This is an especially common trope in software. If someone can make software that does something you consider bad, it will happen. Also it's software. There is no difference between it being available to one person or a million. The moment the software exists and can be copied an unbound number of times.
More likely than not it would be used to deanonymise the author.
So it's a "no" by default.
Fundamentally it's a fuzzy signal and people shouldn't rely on it. The general public does not understand Boolean logic (oh, so the SynthID is not there, therefore this image is real). The sooner AI watermarking faces its deserved farcical demise the better.
Also something about how AI is not special and we haven't added or needed invisible watermarks for other ways media can be manipulated deceptively since time immemorial, but that's less of a practical argument and more of a philosophical one.
I’m not very well read on the topic and you seen to take a strong “con” stance. Curious to hear why you think it deserves such a demise
To pass fake/modified image as genuine?
Uh... you can do this pretty easily since day 1. Just use Stable Diffusion with a low denoising strength. This repo presents an even less destructive way[0], but it has always been very easy to hide that an image is generated by Nano Banana.
[0]: if it does what it claims to do. I didn't verify. Given how much AI writing in the README my hunch is that this doesn't work better than simple denoising.
kinda ironic you can clearly see signs of Claude, as it shows misaligning table walls in the readme doc
Parenthesized, comma-separated lists with no “and” is an even stronger tell. Claude loves those.
I also use those extensively, they just flow better, especially if you have an "and" in the surrounding sentence.
> kinda ironic you can clearly see signs of Claude, as it shows misaligning table walls in the readme doc
This one is such a gigantic clusterfuck... They're mimicking ASCII tables using Unicode chars of varying length and, at times, there's also an off-by-one error. But the model (not Claude, but the model underneath it) is capable of generating ASCII tables.
P.S: I saw the future... The year is 2037 and we've got Unicode tables still not properly aligned.
I mean, just reading the readme content it is pretty obvious it is Claude
It's not really hard as it looks https://deepwalker.xyz/blog/bypassing-synthid-in-gemini-phot...
if you downscale then upscale it removes the watermark
I don't understand all the handwringing. If it's this easy to remove SynthID from an AI-generated image then it wasn't a good solution in the first place.
There is no solution. I don't know why people discuss this subject as if there is a technical solution. As if there are fairies or souls hidden in the pixels that help us tell what is AI generated and what is not.
If you want to make an AI generated image but don't want other people to know that it's AI, the most obvious solution is to not use Gemini. Synth ID is watermarking. It's only ever going to be useful to good actors, who want an AI generated image and aren't trying to hide the fact that it's AI generated.
Yes. This kind of project needs aggressive red teaming, it leads to better products and we need excellent products in this space.
This project proves what red teaming was in place wasn't good enough.
> We're actively collecting pure black and pure white images generated by Nano Banana Pro to improve multi-resolution watermark extraction.
Oh hey, neat. I mentioned this specific method of extracting SynthID a while back.[1]
Glad to see someone take it up.
FWIW, I had Nano Banana create pure white/black images in February, and there was no recognizable watermark in them (all pixels really were #ffffff / #000000 IIRC).
Meta: your comment was marked [dead], like a few other constructive comments I saw in recent days. Not sure why.