[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?