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>due to the arms race that large corporate machines will win

Much like how the entirety of Hollywood, book publishers, academic publishers, and game developers have won against piracy despite being some of the largest corps on earth and dedicating untold billions to the issue over the past 30 years?

> [fighting against the system] is tacitly accepting the barcode.

I don't really see it. I think it's important to win on both fronts.

It's already possible to lie with text. Pixels are pixels. If we can't blindly believe pixels to show the truth, we will be simply back to the pre-photography era which managed to have a concept of truth regardless.

It either works reliably or it doesn't; if it doesn't, it's better that everybody be clear about that.

It's best for privacy not to do this in the first place because:

- Watermarks are optional by AI provider so bad actors will circumvent by using another provider

- GH project proves watermarks can be removed

Given these, trying to ensure "truth" is a futile effort unfortunately, and watermarking only gives companies advantage to violate privacy

Nobody said that?

The concept of truth? A bit overblown don't you think? Because some guy can make a realistic looking fake videos that destroys the "concept" of truth? How?

Stalin had no issues photoshopping images almost 100 years ago.

Of course. Regulations are the EUs primary output these days! Anywhere else they’re just sparkling suggestions.

Maybe we do care about truth, freedom and privacy but the majority of rest of society will happily accept any T&Cs just to get access to whatever the next digital sliced pan is and as for truth and accountability, if they were two sides of the same coin on the ground people wouldn't bend down to pick it up as possesing it looks too much like responsibility and inconvenience.

The watermarking should be on those things we want to verify as something that was not generated or manipulated. Something you'd add to, for instance, cameras. Putting them on the generated/manipulated is backwards as you can never get every model to watermark.

I think you'll have to clarify the cause and effect of that a bit.

Also note that people have been falling for obviously watermarked videos already.

And even if they weren't, wouldn't that just make them more gullible towards non-watermarked models?

I have not read anyone claim that SynthID had a false alarm issue, so if it returned positive I would believe it is synthetic.

You can count on them doing it in a way that's economical for them. It's how email spam filters and ad blockers work. Sure somebody will always find a way to bypass it, and that's the arms race. A filter with zero false positives that removes 80% of slop is pretty darn good though.

Where did you get that info from? According to Google's own docs as well as my own image generation tests via the API, it supports up to 4K natively for gemini-3.1-flash-image-preview (aka NB2).

It just defaults to 1K. But I didn't see anything in the docs stating that it's just a simple upscale for larger resolutions.

https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/image-generation#gener...

It's not upscaling for NB2, 4K outputs are very different from 1K, and output tokens count is also different.

With the number of fine-tuned LoRAs and checkpoints - from a realism standpoint, yes SDXL is still very viable. From a prompt adherency perspective, absolutely not.

Qwen-Image-2512 / Z-Image / Flux.2 absolutely crush SDXL if you're actually generating moderately complex scenes.

Ignoring that a watermark removal tool does not help with this threat model, the claim is still true: the original image can not be changed, and instead a copy is created.

So what? I can also open an image in Photoshop and make sure it saves out some Photoshop specific EXIF data and try to claim the image was doctored. What I can't do is go and put my deceptive altered file up in place of the original in all the places on the Internet it exists.

There's probably a technical solution, such as the camera manufacturer cryptographically signing a GPS location and timestamp together with the pixels. Like all DRM it will probably be broken though, and more importantly, would anyone (even e.g. a newspaper editor) care enough to verify the signature?

This is more akin to having a fake passport and pretending you're not American when asked.

So letting people know you’ve used AI is not a good thing? Best used in covert is what you’re saying?