In a new paper out this week, a group from the University of Maryland found it's too easy to evade current methods of watermarking—and even to add fake watermarks to real images.
himself an optimistic person. But the University of Maryland computer science professor is blunt when he sums up the current state of watermarking AI images. “We don’t have any reliable watermarking at this point,” he says. “We broke all of them.”
It’s timely research. Watermarking has emerged as one of the more promising strategies to identify AI-generated images and text. Just as physical watermarks are embedded on paper money and stamps to prove authenticity, digital watermarks are meant to trace the origins of images and text online, helping people spot deepfaked videos and bot-authored books. With the US presidential elections on the horizon in 2024, concerns over manipulated media are high—and some people are already getting fooled.
The flaws in watermarking haven’t dissuaded tech giants from offering it up as a solution, but people working within the AI detection space are wary. “Watermarking at first sounds like a noble and promising solution, but its real-world applications fail from the onset when they can be easily faked, removed, or ignored,” Ben Colman, the CEO of AI-detection startup Reality Defender, says.
Some of Feizi’s colleagues think watermarking has its place, too. “Whether this is a blow to watermarking depends a lot on the assumptions and hopes placed in watermarking as a solution,” says Yuxin Wen, a PhD student at the University of Maryland who coauthored a recent paper suggesting a new watermarking technique.
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