Meta's Un-Stable Signature(hackerfactor.com)
131 points by ementally 4 days ago | 5 comments
miohtama 11 hours ago
Related to this, the EU AI Act requires mandatory watermarking that is cannot be removed or is illegal to remove.

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-icons-l...

If Facebook already embeds user IDs in images (AI or no AI) I can only drool to think what kind tracking, advertising and mass surveillance opportunities are coming.

InsideOutSanta 8 hours ago
I don't see anything about watermarking in the linked article, it's about labelling requirements. It describes situations where you are required to disclose if an image was AI-generated.
N19PEDL2 8 hours ago
How can a watermark be unremovable?
2 hours ago
embedding-shape 8 hours ago
The actual rules don't say that I think, it's more about the intention that the watermark is embedded with the image/multimedia itself, so it's persisting even if someone "right-click > save" the image or takes a screenshot, not literally regulated the watermark has to be unremovable.

> (Summary) The icon should be directly embedded into the deep fake or published text (except for creative works), unless equivalent alternatives are available such as a user interface overlay. The icon must be visible when content is reshared or downloaded.

charcircuit 8 hours ago
It says the icons are optional. So that icon must not be what the other person was talking about.
embedding-shape 8 hours ago
> It says the icons are optional. So that icon must not be what the other person was talking about.

What "watermark" are they talking about if not the label/icons? The label/icon in question are what the whole "EU Icons for labelling AI-generated content" thing is about, someone correct me if I'm having a big brain fart.

Ohentis 6 hours ago
I imagine the goal is for everything to use something like Google's synthid.
embedding-shape 5 hours ago
That sounds like one possible implementation, not the goal per se. The goal (the explicit/stated one at least) is to give people a heads up what's AI generated vs not, when that's unclear.
itake 10 hours ago
A watermark is not just “transparency.” It can reveal what tool someone used, how they work, or that an image came from a stigmatized platform. In sensitive contexts—politics, sexuality, medical issues, protest material, or private expression—that can become surveillance.

I am working on Saigon Watermarks: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/saigon-watermark/id6777061197 for detecting and removing provenence markers in AI.

The tool also removes c2pa markers, which google is now linking the device that took the photo with the photo.

scary stuff.

https://security.googleblog.com/2025/09/pixel-android-truste...

UltraSane 2 hours ago
When generative AI can create such good fake images a valid c2pa linked to the source camera will become mandatory for an image to be considered authentic.
nocoolnametom 1 hour ago
This is what REALLY pains me about this discussion: I am 100% about personal digital freedom, but I am also 100% opposed to promoting political violence and promoting theft and grift using generative AI. If C2PA is going to work towards one goal by being diametrically opposed to the other then it _cannot_ be a useful tool and we need an _actual_ solution. I was extremely excited by C2PA until today and now am only disappointed that there isn't already some better solution.

Edit: Thinking through this a bit more, I think the goal of _authenticating_ a photo using C2PA is still useful. If the goal is to remove them to get a "naked" image, that's fine, such an image is then inherently no more or less trustworthy than any other image. If the goal is to figure out how to reproduce a valid provenance chain on top of an altered image then I have problems with that.

RobotToaster 8 hours ago
No android version?
itake 8 hours ago
Still working on it...

I'm waiting on Apple to approve the MacOS version. After I will either focus on removing SynthID (currently not supported) or releasing android.

hparadiz 3 hours ago
Another reason to drop both iOS and Android.
kamranjon 1 hour ago
How common is it for peer reviewed papers like this to be so far off their claimed findings?

“According to Google's peer-reviewed and published paper, they claim to have a true positive rate (TPR) above 99.97% -- meaning that they will miss their own watermarks less than 1 in 10,000 times. However, my own empirical testing found that is it much closer to 1 in 20.”

a34729t 1 hour ago
If there were bounties for invalidating peer reviewed research, I suspect this would be a lot leas common.
richardfey 10 hours ago
This is a great statistical analysis and it was a pleasure to read, but I wasn't expecting the claims to be so poorly supported. There's also a reply from one of the Meta authors there, worth checking out.
flaxxer 15 hours ago
also, easily bypassed now: https://twotensors.ai/
tarpitt 14 hours ago
There is actually an older method for countering steganography and adversarial image generation attacks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_blur
miohtama 11 hours ago
AFAIK these methods claim to be blur resistant
masfuerte 2 hours ago
Yes. These methods don't work reliably. Apply a blur and they still don't work reliably.