[AnthonyMouse]

> No really, why would I _need_ to remove a watermark for _legitimate_ purposes?

When removing the watermark is easy, a very legitimate purpose of making the code to do it publicly available is to make a public demonstration that it's easy to do.

As for content use cases, suppose someone is using AI to modify their appearance because they're being unjustly targeted by an oppressive government. That government naturally bans doing that because they want to be able to identify and arrest their critics, so now if you make videos with your real face you get arrested but if you use a generated avatar then the watermark enables automated censorship because the government orders anything with the watermark to have its reach automatically restricted.

[KaiserPro]

> suppose someone is using AI to modify their appearance because they're being unjustly targeted by an oppressive government

Then use a mask like everyone else. digital mask, one that obscures.

which is my main point, no, there isn't a legitimate need.

realtime avatars don't generally have invisible watermarks, also they are running from your machine, otherwise you've got a (normally credit card) trail to your front door. plus a video stream

also if you are generating stuff from a public provider, then tracing people isn't that hard to do.

[amanaplanacanal]

As someone else pointed out: if watermarks are required, then everybody will assume an image without a watermark is the honest truth, which is obviously not true. Someone will end up in prison because of some image. This is bad.

[KaiserPro]

but right now, we are eroding trust at an industrial scale.

There are no reliable tools for the end user, normal person, to work out if an image is AI or not. This erodes trust and lets bad actors get away with "oh thats AI generated" or use AI to defraud users.

[AnthonyMouse]

But watermarks don't fix that because the bad actors could just use a model that doesn't include a watermark regardless of whether or not the ones that do can be removed. Foreign powers and monied interests were always going to have access to those and there are also already published local models that don't include them.

It's like making your image editing software watermark every image it edits in case someone photoshops a picture to show something that didn't happen. What's the point when anyone trying to fool people will always have access to ones that don't do that?

[AnthonyMouse]

> Then use a mask like everyone else. digital mask, one that obscures.

It's not a matter of whether there are alternatives. If you can produce one without a watermark, and having the watermark allows the bad guys to cause trouble for you, then you have a legitimate reason to produce one without a watermark.

Wearing a mask also has different trade offs. A filter can change the shape of your face while continuing to allow you to show facial expressions.

> realtime avatars don't generally have invisible watermarks, also they are running from your machine, otherwise you've got a (normally credit card) trail to your front door.

"You don't have to remove the watermark because it didn't have one to begin with" isn't a way out. If anyone can create a video of themselves looking like $TARGET and saying despicable things without a watermark then you can't trust that a video without a watermark is real and the watermarks are pointless. Whereas if they're all supposed to have watermarks then you can't use the excuse that the video shouldn't have one to need removing.

> also if you are generating stuff from a public provider, then tracing people isn't that hard to do.

Only if the provider is subject to the jurisdiction/control of the user's oppressors.