from Hacker News

An early look at cryptographic watermarks for AI-generated content

by jgrahamc on 3/19/25, 2:05 PM with 23 comments

  • by yalogin on 3/19/25, 3:49 PM

    Without going into the technical efficacy of such schemes ( I am a skeptic), the proposed solution requires the entity generating the media to use it. Isn’t that a flaw? Why would an attacker use it willingly? If they did not want to push an AI generated content as a real one, they would have willingly made that distinction themselves.

    The point is, there is no good solution here unless there is regulation, but these attempts at solutions are useful in the long run

  • by ForHackernews on 3/19/25, 3:53 PM

    Isn't it better/easier to go the other way? What if cameras included some kind of secured element that signed real content?

    Maybe it would technically be possible to defeat, but we're already pretty good at making it difficult/expensive to extract a private key from hardware.

  • by PeterStuer on 3/19/25, 3:33 PM

    I'm not sure a good case is made here regarding the "problems" this is intended to solve.

    OTOH, could this be another step towards prohibiting Open Source models?

  • by Domguinard on 3/20/25, 4:08 PM

    Pretty thorough blogpost. One clarification though: digital watermarking has been a core (but optional) part of C2PA since version 2.1. There is now a standard way of linking any (approved) digital watermarking technology to C2PA manifests and use the watermarks to created stronger content credentials and allow recovering removed manifests, more about this here: https://www.digimarc.com/blog/c2pa-21-strengthening-content-...

  • by quickpopin on 3/19/25, 5:00 PM

    Building increasingly advanced and hard to detect tools for, and obligating platforms to allow, user media uploads with embedded steganographic data is a disaster from a legal and content moderation perspective.

  • by pizzafeelsright on 3/19/25, 4:17 PM

    Watermarking seems silly considering the original intent of the Internet was sharing data. The value is in the delivery.

  • by RKFADU_UOFCCLEL on 3/19/25, 5:01 PM

    People like this aren't actually concerned with the problems they talk about, they just stop thinking it through when it looks like the meta is favorable to their business model. Then they say "the internet is broken, only we can save it". Etc., nothing new or interesting even from a political perspective. For example how Google one day out of the blue decided they need to track mouse movement to prove anyone is human (in this case, likely to feed data to police because that's a globally unique identifier). They just decided that's the only solution to the "Problem" (TM).