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Comment by gpvos | Hacker News Reader

I don't care about copyright one iota, but this may be useful in distinguishing fake images from real photos.

People generating fake photos will just use an AI that doesn't leave a watermark. We are quickly approaching the point at which AI-generated and real images just cannot be distinguished, and we're going to have to adapt to that.

There's value is raising the bar of difficulty, even if you don't make it completely impossible.

I see a future where training a model without a watermark is illegal.

The other perspective is traceable cameras, such that you can have some guarantee that an image came from a particular device and wasn't AI-generated (e.g. your camera signs each image after capture).

There have been attempts to cryptographically sign images, which have largely been broken, but the principle is there: https://www.dpreview.com/opinion/9955873926/why-cryptographi...

See https://contentauthenticity.org/how-it-works

If the plan is to trust every phone and camera manufacturer to keep their key safe then the plan is stupid.

If the plan is to have a few trusted manufacturers for CCTV and police cameras than that might work, but will do little to combat misinformation.

>We are quickly approaching the point at which AI-generated and real images just cannot be distinguished

Eh, there are so many ways where a large photo can fail. I'm obsessed with AI Art, but I think there will be human(or AI) detectors that will be paid to determine validity.

Or just use a watermark removing AI.

> we're going to have to adapt to that.

I don't see how we can without great harm. The only adaptation that I can see is to stop trusting in anything at all, and we're already dangerously far down that road as it is.

Yeah, a zero-trust society totally won't catastrophically implode, trust me bro.

Not in general. You can't detect this watermark without access to the original model (the paper authors bill this as a feature). So the model owner could do that test to check if their particular model produced some image, but a third party trying to work out whether a given image was fake (a) would not have the data they need, and (b) even if they did, would need to repeat the test for every possible image generating model in existence.

All photos are edited in their taking. As such, all images represent a "fake" reality. The only difference between an AI "fake" image and photograph is the camera.

That's a lonely hill to die on..

<< As such, all images represent a "fake" reality.

Parent may not be expressing it right, but he does have a point. There is a level of 'interpretation' that is being done during the taking of a picture. If you add to this recent attempts to incorporate AI into picture taking to add/remove parts thereof all of a sudden parent's proposition does not sound so far fetched.

Granted, it is still a different level than just generating an image from a prompt, but I would not dismiss the thought outright.

It's a rather extreme view but there is a lot that can be done with photography that can be very misleading. If you see a photo that seems incredible, it might be. People's general skepticism of photos is too low, AI might bring that skepticism a bit higher which I think would be a good thing.

You can think of a photo like a news article, the author can be completely truthful while omitting certain facts to give a false impression. The same can be done with how a photo is framed, cropped and processed.

The intent of a photographer can definitely be translated into the photograph or it wouldn't be an artform.

No, it's a point people forget. Even 20 years ago people were asking "is this photo photoshopped?", but if you're viewing it on a webpage, it has absolutely been photoshopped. The problem is we aren't good at specifying what we mean by "photoshopped". Any photo you view has been digitally altered, getting more specific gets into the alterer's intent which gets really messy really quick.

What difference does it make if it was digitally altered or in an analogue fashion? A slightly longer exposure is also not showing reality as seen by human eyes. Besides, there is no single reality even among humans.

There's a difference between what happens when you point a regular digital camera at the moon and take a photo and what happens when you do that with a Samsung Space Zoom phone. Most people believe that difference is an important one.

If “sight” is perceptually completed in the visual cortex, then everything we see is “fake”. - Mr. Magoo

The actual question to ask isn't "is this fake?" it's "how is this record likely to have been manipulated or constructed and whom does it serve?"

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