It's baffling that this requires auth. OpenAI's own tool (https://openai.com/research/verify/) doesn't require auth.

Even Google themselves previously offered a no-auth way (just very niche): if you uploaded an image to Google Image search, and went to "About this image", it would show if the image was Google AI-generated. Now it doesn't.

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possibilistic an hour ago | parent | next [-]

These are "spy"marks, not watermarks:

https://brand.io/article/spymarks/

We need to inform everyone that this technology can encode database identifiers and enough entropy to uniquely identify you as an author (or downloader).

This extends to other forms of media as well.

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cubefox an hour ago | parent [-]

They are not spymarks if they don't encode any personal IDs and are merely used to indicate that an image was AI-generated. I don't think Google or OpenAI use SynthID to include personal data.

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MisterMunchkin an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Come on man, they're both advertising companies. Would you resist the opportunity to build that social graph and detect a known user anywhere on the internet?

	▲	cubefox 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Of course. Privacy is a feature that increases their product value. Moreover, they could get into trouble with the GDPR if they secretly included tracking information in their images.

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morkalork an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

And there lies the rub. You can't verify if they do or don't embed such content. These companies are just like "trust me bro".

	▲	orng an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Indeed and Google has built its empire through tracking users across the internet so it is really hard to trust that they won't..

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98codes 31 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's worth nothing that this IS Google.

Given that it's an ad company, they want something to connect what you're doing to the rest of their data, and they couldn't possibly keep the old image search results there if they want people to use this.

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Retr0id an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's presumably so they can rate-limit people who are trying to reverse-engineer or otherwise strip it (e.g. iteratively tweaking until it stops getting detected)

	▲	user43928 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I wonder how relevant this really is. How hard can it be to download a set of real images and generated ones in order to train a model to detect and strip the watermark with minimal perceptual difference?

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brokensegue 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah I've been wanting to run a ton of Wikipedia images through the detector to see if fakes snuck in. Doesn't seem to be a practical way to do this. Even Open AIs tool has a low rate limit

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wodenokoto an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The EULA you have to accept hints that they are afraid you are going to abuse it to remove synthID - e.g, set up and edit and check loop

	▲	dannyw an hour ago \| parent [-]
		That’s the justification, but the EULA incorporates Google’s regular consumer terms; which means what you upload can also be used for advertising and targeting; and basically any purpose whatsoever by Google.

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apefulsin 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Any access to a watermark detector can be used to remove the watermark. Presumably they want to be able to track who is doing that.

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lelandfe 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've never seen it mentioned anywhere so I will just here complain that Google also removed the ability to paste images into Google Image search some years ago for no apparent reason. It worked great and I used it all the time.

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mh- an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Click the little camera icon in the search box and it pops a modal that says Search any image with Google Lens.

The textbox below it says Paste image link, but you can actually paste an image from your clipboard here, too.

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qingcharles 12 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

And if it doesn't work on the Google home page, just go to images.google.com and do the same, it always works there for some reason.

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lelandfe an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

You’re a hero. So glad I complained. Why would they not just keep this working with the main text box focused…

	▲	_flux an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		In similar fashion in the Android Play Store they moved the search off from the top bar. For some time they educated users that "oo the search is no longer here, you need to click there -> to get to the page with search!". That has stopped (for me?), but they still haven't found any other use for same place in the first view. I suppose it was too convenient.
	▲	mh- an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		No idea. I used it a lot too, not sure if pasting here worked from the beginning of them introducing this Google Lens thing or not.

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dannyw an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I wonder if it’s a deliberate anti-user decision to get more URLs and less pasted images.

URLs expand Googlebot’s indexes; pasted images don’t.

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bossyTeacher an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I might be missing something but Google Image Search still works for me.

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RugnirViking 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

this + image translate with copy+paste is the only reason I ever use yandex of all places...

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MisterMunchkin an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's deliberate so that you can't find a way to bypass it.

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cubefox an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

OpenAI's tool is worse though, because it doesn't detect SynthID from non-OpenAI models. I just tried it with various images created by Imagen / Nano Banana.