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Then why care about a watermark?
Because it's yet another signal prejudiced people get to use against me to dismiss my projects as slop.
But in the absence of a reliable signal (which I doubt this is anyway, so I'm speaking hypothetically), lots of people will get their work dismissed as AI-generated when it isn't.
People should not be dismissing other people's work at all, AI generated or not.

If you're looking for signals, it's because you want to do something based on the result. Maybe people should work on getting rid of that impulse instead.

> People should not be dismissing other people's work at all, AI generated or not.

It depends on what the nature of the work is. If it's a work where technical soundness is the most important thing, then I agree. The criteria should be whether or not the work is sound.

But not everything is like that. Take fine art, for instance, where being human-made is a core part of its value.

It's fine to appreciate human art for what it is. I can empathize with the idea that the art is an external expression of the author's mind. The output of the weights of the author's brain, if you will.

I absolutely draw the line at thoughtlessly dismissing AI art as "slop" though.

> I absolutely draw the line at thoughtlessly dismissing AI art as "slop" though.

Fair enough. I don't call it "slop" unless it is, and slop can certainly be made without involving computers. But genAI has without question made slop very easy to generate and so we're seeing quite a lot more of it these days.

I'm just saying why genAI art, sloppy or not, is of no interest to me and why I get angry when I've been deceived about it. Watermarking, if it were possible to reliably do (which I think it isn't), would solve that particular issue by making deception impossible. Without a reliable signal, a lot of stuff made after a certain date will inevitably and necessarily be suspect. Not saying that's right or wrong, just that it is. Maybe think of it as the audience being self-protective.

A reliable signal might even make acceptance of machine-generated art easier, by eliminating or reducing the chances that people will feel tricked.

It's a thought-terminating cliche at this point.
If you're a gamer: Have you seen the amount of AI slop on Steam? Or the amount of poorly created translations banged out with AI? Or the amount of shitty decomps appearing daily developed with Claude? People are looking for signals because AI usage is a strong signal of poor quality trash. You are not going to overcome that barrier by complaining it's being made obvious of it or complaining that people are being 'prejudiced', the only way you will overcome it is by proving you have something of actual worth. And if you can't prove that, then maybe you need to reevaluate what you are creating.
> Have you seen the amount of AI slop on Steam?

I think I might have purchased some of those.

> Or the amount of shitty decomps appearing daily developed with Claude?

I'm developing one of those "shitty" decomps.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49267102

I'm still annotating the game myself though. Because I care about it and actually want to learn how it works.

> People are looking for signals because AI usage is a strong signal of poor quality trash.

Yes, I understand you want to dismiss works based purely on provenance without actually evaluating it on its merits.

Pre-judgement, as I said. Prejudice.

No, I will not help you do it.

> the only way you will overcome it is by proving you have something of actual worth

Ah yes, please continue. Do tell me about the worth of my own projects. GitHub and website links are on my profile.

> Yes, I understand you want to dismiss works based purely on provenance without actually evaluating it on its merits.

I have gone over almost 20,000 games on Steam because I focus on indie game curation. If you have actually paid attention around you to the kinds of things people are throwing out there then you would understand. I have seen games that literally do not function with a bunch of generated assets [1], games whose sole providence is combining generated hollow art with a generated hollow story [2]. You are dealing with thousands of people who are doing exactly the same thing as you, with the same quality and the same reasoning. Your work can and will get filtered out along with the rest of them because you are using the same signal in the same way.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2832640/DEAD_GET_REKT/

[2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/3694060/Manos_The_Hands_O...