This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Only gonna make things more difficult for good actors while doing absolutely nothing to bad actors
That's true, but it would be nice to have codified way of applying a watermark denoting AI. I'm not say the government of CA is the best consortium, but laws are one way to get a standard.
If a compliant watermarker is then baked into the programs designed for good actors, that's a start.
It would be as practical for good actors to simply state an image is generated in its caption, citation, or some other preexisting method. Good actors will retransmit this information, while bad actors will omit it, just like they’d remove the watermark. At least this way, no special software is required for the average person to check if an image is generated.
Bing Image Creator already implements watermarks but it is trivially easy for me to download an image I generated, remove the watermark, and proceed with my ruining of democracy /s
I wasn't thinking of like a watermark that is like anyone's signature. More of a crypto signature most users couldn't detect. Not a watermark that could be removed with visual effects. Something most people don't know is there, like a printer's signature for anti-counterfeiting.
I don't want to use the word blockchain, but some kind of way that if you want to take a fake video created by someone else, you are going to have a serious math problem on your hands to take away the fingerprints of AI. That way any viral video of unknown origin can easily be determined to be AI without any "look at the hands arguments".
I'm just saying, a solution only for good guys isn't always worthless. I don't actually think what I'm saying is too feasible. (Especially as written.) Sometimes rules for good guys only isn't always about taking away freedom, but to normalize discourse. Although, my argument is not particularly good here, as this is a CA law, not a standard. I would like the issue at least discussed at a joint AI consortium.
If your plan requires good actors to put in extra effort, it's a bad plan
How in the world would this make anything more difficult for good actors?
Watermarking AI-generated content might sound like a practical approach for legislators to track and regulate such material, but it's likely to fall short in practice. Firstly, AI technology evolves rapidly, and watermarking methods can become obsolete almost as soon as they're developed. Hackers and tech-savvy users could easily find ways to remove or alter these watermarks.
Secondly, enforcing a universal watermarking standard across all AI platforms and content types would be a logistical nightmare, given the diversity of AI applications and the global nature of its development and deployment.
Additionally, watermarking doesn't address deeper ethical issues like misinformation or the potential misuse of deepfakes. It's more of a band-aid solution that might give a false sense of security, rather than a comprehensive strategy for managing the complexities of AI-generated content.
This comment brought to you by an LLM.
It would also be impossible to force a watermark on open source AI image generators such as stable diffusion since someone could just download the code, disable the watermark function and compile it or just use an old version.
Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
The evil bit is a fictional IPv4 packet header field proposed in a humorous April Fools' Day RFC from 2003, authored by Steve Bellovin. The Request for Comments recommended that the last remaining unused bit, the "Reserved Bit" in the IPv4 packet header, be used to indicate whether a packet had been sent with malicious intent, thus making computer security engineering an easy problem – simply ignore any messages with the evil bit set and trust the rest.
^to^ ^opt^ ^out^^,^ ^pm^ ^me^ ^'optout'.^ ^article^ ^|^ ^about^
The problem here will be when companies start accusing smaller competitors/startups of using AI when they haven't used it at all.
It's getting harder and harder to tell when a photograph is AI generated or not. Sometimes they're obvious, but it makes you second guess even legitimate photographs of people because you noticed that they have 6 fingers or their face looks a little off.
A perfect example of this was posted recently where, 80-90% of people thought that the AI pictures were real pictures and that the Real pictures were AI generated.
And where do you draw the line? What if I used AI to remove a single item in the background like a trashcan? Do I need to go back and watermark anything that's already been generated?
What if I used AI to upscale an image or colorize it? What if I used AI to come up with ideas, and then painted it in?
And what does this actually solve? Anyone running a misinformation campaign is just going to remove the watermark and it would give us a false sense of "this can't be AI, it doesn't have a watermark".
The actual text in the bill doesn't offer any answers. So far it's just a statement that they want to implement something "to allow consumers to easily determine whether images, audio, video, or text was created by generative artificial intelligence."
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240SB942
I wouldn't really call that a perfect example, they really went out of their way to edit the "real" people photos to look unrealistically smooth.
I mean yeah technically it's a 'real people vs ai people' take, but realistically it's a 'fake photo vs fake photo' take.
I don't agree that it's a fake vs fake issue here.
Even if the "real" photos were touched up in Lightroom or Photoshop, those are tools that actual photographers use.
It goes to show that there are cases where photos of real people look more AI generated than not.
The problem here is that we start second guessing whether a photo was AI generated or not and we run into cases where real artists are being told that they need to find a "different style" to avoid it looking too much like AI generated photos.
If that wasn't a perfect example for you then maybe this one is better: https://www.pcgamer.com/artist-banned-from-art-subreddit-because-their-work-looked-ai-generated/
Now think of what can happen to an artist if they publish something in California that has a style that makes it look somewhat AI generated.
The problem with this law is that it will be weaponized against certain individuals or smaller companies.
It doesn't matter if they can eventually prove that the photo wasn't AI generated or not. The damage will be done after they are put through the court system. Having a law where you can put someone through that system just because something "looks" AI generated is a bad idea.
Edit: And the intent of that law is also to include AI text generation. Just think of all the students being accused of using AI for their homework and how reliable other tools have been for determining whether their work is AI generated or not.
We're going to unleash that on authors as well?
I agree completely.
To make it more ironic, one of the popular uses of AI is to remove watermarks...
If your computer is connected through a VPN to a different state, does that mean you can get around it?
... and also abortion doctors to carry medicine that reverses abortion if a women wants it.
Come on dems! Republicans are blowing us out of the water on requiring absurd technology that doesn't exist. We should try to enforce the 3 laws of robotics!
Completely impractical. If something is AI generated, or manipulated with Photoshop or in the darkroom really doesn't make a difference. AI isn't special here, photo manipulation is about as old as the photograph itself. It would be much better to spend some effort into signing authentic images,including a whole chain of trust up to the actual camera. Luckily the Content Authenticity Initiative is already working on that.
Given how unenforceable this is (a sin of omission or source from another jurisdiction is all that's needed to skirt), will we be seeing a formalized 'certificate of authenticity' demanded by people to highlight things that are not AI?
(Maybe NFT will find find its utility? I don't know...)
