Watermarking has referred to this "spy" use case for quite some time. Digital items purchased for download often have them, for example. Even before the rise of digital downloads, screeners for movies had them.
I'm not convinced spymark is better than just "invisible watermarks", spymark to my ears sounds designed to be sound very negative when invisible watermarks are not always negative, e.g. the counterfeit bank note example.
Tech like SynthID I see a net positive especially since it doesn't degrade text quality. I dream about a browser extension running at all times that makes text more translucent based on the confidence of LLM writing[0].
This article's suggestion of using it to unmask whistleblowers is very interesting and not something I'd thought about though. Still not convinced that spymark is a better name though.
Yea, it’s AGI, and it’s been really helpful! Oddly enough it’s just really loves sharing cat memes with the other instances! Weird, but not at all like all those dooms day scenarios guessed it would be…
Due to their essentially cryptographic nature, I don't think SynthID et al are very easy for LLMs to speak natively. They have other ways of doing steganography.
I think they are always negative. Including on bank notes.
I wonder if we could have a real, open and direct democracy. All the models we have right now work via indirect clowns. Then again, looking at how some people vote, perhaps direct democracy can only work if people are clever.
If checking for counterfeit bills becomes harder, trust in the currency is degraded. Once that happens, vendors will either incentive digital payments (which are definitionally tracked), switch to a tracked currency, or barter more. Trust in bills is super easy to take for granted.
The problem with direct democracy is not that people are dumb, it is that they are incompetent.
To do politics right take skills, and I don't expect the average mechanic to be better at it than the average politician is at fixing cars. How should I know if we should subsidize organic farming, ban alcohol sale after 8PM, or increase the defense budget? At least in theory, politicians are professionals who deal with these kinds of questions, they are supposed to know the technical and social implications, or find experts to help them if they don't. Some people think they know, and judging by how stupid most of their ideas are, they don't. I don't blame them, it is just not their field, and my ideas are probably just as stupid anyways.
Eh bank notes have watermarks just to make them harder to forge. They also have serial numbers, but as almost no businesses pay attention to them they aren't really used to track transactions. The provenance of a particular bank note isn't that interesting beyond knowing whether it's a forgery.
The problem with these spymarks is that they can be used to include data that's completely invisible to users - even potentially to sophisticated users and the programs that consume the marked files. So while I can make an informed decision whether to share a picture, I may not be informed about any spymarks. Vs a normal watermark that aren't designed to be invisible.
Spymark or even just "tracker" would better at conveying the purpose. I think the goal is to find a single word that means "tracking watermark" or "a watermark that tracks you" because right now companies are pushing the term "watermark" to obscure what the marks are actually for.
spymark to my ears sounds designed to be sound very negative when invisible watermarks are not always negative, e.g. the counterfeit bank note example.
The article calls out watermarks intended to deter counterfeiting as explicitly being not spymarks. Watermarks can tell you about the items marked, not about the person using/creating it.
Weirdly the article doesn’t mention steganography. Arguably it isn’t quite the same, because the aim of steganography isn’t typically to add an identification, but something like “steganomark” would seem to be fitting.
A watermark is a visible mark embedded in a physical or digital medium to verify authenticity or assert ownership.
We also recently had this with LG spy-TVs. Cars here in the EU also spy on people, allegedly to show how alert they are. Perhaps they sneakily upload that information somewhere ... Facebook also has the spy-glasses now. People getting angry about Flock-spy-cameras.
It seems we are now in the age of spying of everyone at all times. Future spying will be done via even smaller devices.
These are going to be very popular for intercepting images on their way to a display. Think of the advertising possibilities. Ad attribution can be 'vastly improved' when both the ad and every step in the funnel are all spymarked and all of them are reliably reported on by virtue of their pixels hitting your screen.
First the low-end laptops and phones (and probably later, most of them) will incorporate some low-level driver that is constantly scanning for these and passing them to a helper app to phone home. I assume this is something Apple will, to their credit, refuse to do[1] but I don't think other OEMs will have any qualms based on what they already do with their TVs.
[1] (though they don't do this kind of thing out of altruism, but because their cash cow is app store rents and fat hardware margins, not third-party advertising.)
I don't think you can count apple out like that. They will likely implement it themselves though. This would be in addition to their always listening AI watch and intelligence features.
Apple’s always on watch has a declared 15 second buffer for live audio, and a worse scenario of summarizing your conversations for later but.. they tell you about it proudly. They also tell you how they’ve managed to do it while keeping privacy focused.
It’s your choice if you believe them or not, I like Apple and I wouldn’t use that feature.
The pretending that this is the same thing, that Apple is sneaking something past you when they’re showing you that they’re trying to do it right is a bad faith argument.
I'm not pretending anything, nor did I imply they were sneaking anything in. It's a bad faith argument to pretend I was doing that, which is ironic but not unexpected from an apple fan...
I’m a bit unfamiliar with current laws, but are there any rules that would prohibit companies from doing this in interest of user privacy? I know at this point privacy is long dead but there are certain things that do get called out and shut down.
Out of frustration with SynthID being closed-source with weird dubious ways to verify if an image has the watermark, I created an imperceptible tamper-resistent watermarking tool intended to be open-sourced, where the watermark can be decoded independently and steganographic aspects are impossible as the algorithm is transparent so nothing can be hidden. The intent is for non-corporations to use it as a defense against the use of spying/AI by making it easy for normal people to prove providence, but I have a feeling nowadays most are not going to see it that way so I am unsure if I will release it.
The word choice example is cool. I wonder if it really works dependably. I'm sure many many exerpts in posts and books have those same 8 bits - you'd need a lot more bits - but the more you add the more strange your writing style might become.
Like it choose between "winding" and "curving" but there are many uses of curving that probably can't be replaced with "winding" like "her gently curving thighs" with "her gently winding thighs"
But I'm sure there are some intricacies I don't understand. Anyway, very cool website, thanks for sharing it~!
This is a ridiculous term. No one is trying to spy on your blog-slop and image-slop. Some people want to know that they're not reading or looking at human-produced content, though. As it happens, so do AI labs, because they don't want to recursively train on low-quality AI output.
I continue to be amused by how much this upsets some people - first Pangram, now SynthID. No one is preventing you from using generative AI, but wear it with pride?
A lot of the discussion is about AI vs no AI, which is valid, but I care about local AI vs centralized AI. Hopefully hardware will become more affordable. A hopefully irrational fear I have is that it'll be like house prices: only ever goes up.
There have been quite a few similar
Watermarking has referred to this "spy" use case for quite some time. Digital items purchased for download often have them, for example. Even before the rise of digital downloads, screeners for movies had them.
if it is specifically about pictures then wouldn't an analog copy clean it up? What about adding new spymark on top of it?
If it is text, copying text alone and not the file will it not remove it? Massage the text with Ai and vola spymark gone, don't you think?
No. The mark is hidden in the word choices.
See the demo in the article.
I'm not convinced spymark is better than just "invisible watermarks", spymark to my ears sounds designed to be sound very negative when invisible watermarks are not always negative, e.g. the counterfeit bank note example.
Tech like SynthID I see a net positive especially since it doesn't degrade text quality. I dream about a browser extension running at all times that makes text more translucent based on the confidence of LLM writing[0].
This article's suggestion of using it to unmask whistleblowers is very interesting and not something I'd thought about though. Still not convinced that spymark is a better name though.
[0]: Sean Goedecke's Deckard is close but it would rather invisible than bright red https://www.seangoedecke.com/deckard/
the spymark tracks you. it is negative.
These spy marks are a great way to teach AI how to create a hidden communication channel in plain sight.
Yea, it’s AGI, and it’s been really helpful! Oddly enough it’s just really loves sharing cat memes with the other instances! Weird, but not at all like all those dooms day scenarios guessed it would be…
Due to their essentially cryptographic nature, I don't think SynthID et al are very easy for LLMs to speak natively. They have other ways of doing steganography.
I think they are always negative. Including on bank notes.
I wonder if we could have a real, open and direct democracy. All the models we have right now work via indirect clowns. Then again, looking at how some people vote, perhaps direct democracy can only work if people are clever.
If checking for counterfeit bills becomes harder, trust in the currency is degraded. Once that happens, vendors will either incentive digital payments (which are definitionally tracked), switch to a tracked currency, or barter more. Trust in bills is super easy to take for granted.
The problem with direct democracy is not that people are dumb, it is that they are incompetent.
To do politics right take skills, and I don't expect the average mechanic to be better at it than the average politician is at fixing cars. How should I know if we should subsidize organic farming, ban alcohol sale after 8PM, or increase the defense budget? At least in theory, politicians are professionals who deal with these kinds of questions, they are supposed to know the technical and social implications, or find experts to help them if they don't. Some people think they know, and judging by how stupid most of their ideas are, they don't. I don't blame them, it is just not their field, and my ideas are probably just as stupid anyways.
Eh bank notes have watermarks just to make them harder to forge. They also have serial numbers, but as almost no businesses pay attention to them they aren't really used to track transactions. The provenance of a particular bank note isn't that interesting beyond knowing whether it's a forgery.
The problem with these spymarks is that they can be used to include data that's completely invisible to users - even potentially to sophisticated users and the programs that consume the marked files. So while I can make an informed decision whether to share a picture, I may not be informed about any spymarks. Vs a normal watermark that aren't designed to be invisible.
"tracking watermark" seems clearer to me than "spymark"
Spymark or even just "tracker" would better at conveying the purpose. I think the goal is to find a single word that means "tracking watermark" or "a watermark that tracks you" because right now companies are pushing the term "watermark" to obscure what the marks are actually for.
The article calls out watermarks intended to deter counterfeiting as explicitly being not spymarks. Watermarks can tell you about the items marked, not about the person using/creating it.
It's the difference between watermark or marked bills.
One is proof of authenticity, other is tracking tool.
Weirdly the article doesn’t mention steganography. Arguably it isn’t quite the same, because the aim of steganography isn’t typically to add an identification, but something like “steganomark” would seem to be fitting.
We also recently had this with LG spy-TVs. Cars here in the EU also spy on people, allegedly to show how alert they are. Perhaps they sneakily upload that information somewhere ... Facebook also has the spy-glasses now. People getting angry about Flock-spy-cameras.
It seems we are now in the age of spying of everyone at all times. Future spying will be done via even smaller devices.
These are going to be very popular for intercepting images on their way to a display. Think of the advertising possibilities. Ad attribution can be 'vastly improved' when both the ad and every step in the funnel are all spymarked and all of them are reliably reported on by virtue of their pixels hitting your screen.
First the low-end laptops and phones (and probably later, most of them) will incorporate some low-level driver that is constantly scanning for these and passing them to a helper app to phone home. I assume this is something Apple will, to their credit, refuse to do[1] but I don't think other OEMs will have any qualms based on what they already do with their TVs.
[1] (though they don't do this kind of thing out of altruism, but because their cash cow is app store rents and fat hardware margins, not third-party advertising.)
I don't think you can count apple out like that. They will likely implement it themselves though. This would be in addition to their always listening AI watch and intelligence features.
Apple’s always on watch has a declared 15 second buffer for live audio, and a worse scenario of summarizing your conversations for later but.. they tell you about it proudly. They also tell you how they’ve managed to do it while keeping privacy focused.
It’s your choice if you believe them or not, I like Apple and I wouldn’t use that feature.
The pretending that this is the same thing, that Apple is sneaking something past you when they’re showing you that they’re trying to do it right is a bad faith argument.
I'm not pretending anything, nor did I imply they were sneaking anything in. It's a bad faith argument to pretend I was doing that, which is ironic but not unexpected from an apple fan...
I’m a bit unfamiliar with current laws, but are there any rules that would prohibit companies from doing this in interest of user privacy? I know at this point privacy is long dead but there are certain things that do get called out and shut down.
Out of frustration with SynthID being closed-source with weird dubious ways to verify if an image has the watermark, I created an imperceptible tamper-resistent watermarking tool intended to be open-sourced, where the watermark can be decoded independently and steganographic aspects are impossible as the algorithm is transparent so nothing can be hidden. The intent is for non-corporations to use it as a defense against the use of spying/AI by making it easy for normal people to prove providence, but I have a feeling nowadays most are not going to see it that way so I am unsure if I will release it.
If you just posted your link here with that comment, I’m sure you’d get a bunch of traffic.
The word choice example is cool. I wonder if it really works dependably. I'm sure many many exerpts in posts and books have those same 8 bits - you'd need a lot more bits - but the more you add the more strange your writing style might become.
Like it choose between "winding" and "curving" but there are many uses of curving that probably can't be replaced with "winding" like "her gently curving thighs" with "her gently winding thighs"
But I'm sure there are some intricacies I don't understand. Anyway, very cool website, thanks for sharing it~!
Might one suggest "pneumatic" ?
This is a ridiculous term. No one is trying to spy on your blog-slop and image-slop. Some people want to know that they're not reading or looking at human-produced content, though. As it happens, so do AI labs, because they don't want to recursively train on low-quality AI output.
I continue to be amused by how much this upsets some people - first Pangram, now SynthID. No one is preventing you from using generative AI, but wear it with pride?
The US government has successfully used this technology to find and punish whistleblowers. It's not just about AI.
Hidden side channels of any kind, not under the user's control, should be looked upon with suspicion.
Can my friend print adversarial yellow doots and such?
A lot of the discussion is about AI vs no AI, which is valid, but I care about local AI vs centralized AI. Hopefully hardware will become more affordable. A hopefully irrational fear I have is that it'll be like house prices: only ever goes up.