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by tadfisher 31 days ago
The point of SynthID is to make generated images identifiable, in an attempt to prevent 1984-esque situations where you can't believe your eyes and ears. Applying it to screenshots and camera output defeats its only purpose.

If the powers-that-be want to enforce age verification, watermarking camera output is not the correct technology to do so. It would be something like HDCP, where camera manufacturers are given keys and a whole trusted media path is built so that the relying party can cryptographically enforce that a trusted camera is being used to capture live images.
2 comments
raron 31 days ago
> The point of SynthID is to make generated images identifiable, in an attempt to prevent 1984-esque situations where you can't believe your eyes and ears.

You can still use traditional methods to manipulate images, too, so I don't think a "does not contain SynthID watermark" means you can trust that image more. In the other hand, encoding a lot of personal and other information in the watermark (136 bit is a lot) that can not be easily removed and most of the people are unaware of it seems really an 1984-like dystopia.

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fc417fc802 31 days ago
You have missed the point by such a wide margin that I have to wonder if it wasn't intentional.

The same techniques used here can be applied in other domains for other purposes. That would not "defeat its only purpose". The danger is the normalization of watermarking for [ insert good reason here ] with regulation eventually making it mandatory once everyone is accustomed to it. Rinse and repeat to gradually boil the frog.

We live in a world where nearly all printers already watermark everything they print with their serial number. It wouldn't be at all surprising if the next modernized variant of that technology encoded personal and contextual data tied to the user.

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throawayonthe 30 days ago
you're the one missing the point: why would this technique be used for any of those? the comment you're replying to describes both the incentives to not do that and existing technology that would be more effective for what you imagine

and yeah exactly printers already watermark, why would they need synthid

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fc417fc802 30 days ago
> describes both the incentives to not do that

It's a bogus claim (as I previously stated). Applying the same technique in another domain or for a different purpose does not defeat the original purpose for which a technique was developed. People can do both things.

No one said anything about printers using synthid. The modernized variant (at least one of them) would apply to digital media produced by the end user.

Although since you asked, if the synthid watermarking scheme is more resilient to transformations and conversions than the current one then switching might prove useful.

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