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?

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/

These spy marks are a great way to teach AI how to create a hidden communication channel in plain sight.

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.

"tracking watermark" seems clearer to me than "spymark"

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.

Will they surrender logs for a legal discovery request?

e.g. Johnny's accused of something white collar, did he ever make any prompts that suggest how early on he was aware of {X} and further indicate how he moved to frame it?

That's a requirement that varies by country.

Have you read anything about the feature?

They’re asserting that all the audio is done on device, and the results of encrypted so they can’t access them even from the backups.

Unlike… EVERY… other tech company, it is in Apple’s interest to be privacy-focused.

Even if you just have to believe them, which you do pretty much, they’re the biggest name pushing for privacy in the world right now. They make more on selling devices than they make on ads and behaviors. It’s in their interest to not lie.

Apple is just Stockholm Syndrome at scale. I wouldn't trust anything they say about privacy, especially given how closed their ecosystem and hardware is.

They lacking in the AI race is an indicator that they value privacy more then competitors.

No, it's just a sign of Apple holding a decades-long grudge against Nvidia to their own detriment.

And there are no alternatives to Nvidia?

“Next we just need to mark the consumer’s retina and brain to ensure our ads truly went through”

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~!

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.

Off topic, on the house price fear - the bubble does occasionally burst! Japan (famously), and also here's a story about Canada & New Zealand, and perhaps Australia.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-18/what-happens-if-prope...

Spymarks just seem like another word for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography. On that note, one way we can prevent it is to assert that all our content is byte-for-byte identical with the last known trusted stage of what we have produced (for example: a camera we are certain does not watermark, an image editor we are certain doesn't watermark, an image compressor we are certain can't watermark, etc). One vector that I am particularly concerned about is social media. Most images and videos uploaded to most social media is re-compressed by the target platform. This is a door to tracking that is far too easy for social media platforms to open. They might rationalize it (if discovered/announced) by saying that our memes won't be reposted, images or work stolen, etc... but honestly I'd rather my work be stolen than tracking information inserted in there. Oh, we also have stuff which is way more secure, like time-stamped cryptographic signatures.

Spymarks just seem like another word for https://en.wikipedia.org/…

Stop using links instead of words. Your comment is literally unreadable without going on to other websites.

the word is the last segment of the url. very readable

I feel like there’s some security engineering calculus that would be useful here?

You can’t definitively prove the absence of a watermark. You can only prove the watermark is there. Once you do prove it’s there, the thing that carries the watermark changes in some way — it is “burned” or tainted?

There must be value in having a visible vs an invisible watermark, or in declaring that a work is watermarked without revealing the hidden mark, or having two marks — one that is publicly verifiable and another that is hidden?

If the process itself can be defeated through adding entropy (or more generally by revealing the watermark algorithm) then is that not security through obscurity, which is to say it is a one-shot rather than a general system that is doomed to become obsolete over time?

Something feels off about a technology based on being hidden but whose only value is in being revealed but I feel dumb for not being able to be more specific about what feels wrong! It could simply be that anyone who can verify the presence of the watermark also now has a tool to tell them when they’ve successfully scrubbed the watermark off the work, so the verify tool has to be kept secret which in turn limits its usefulness.

If you think SynthID-Image can be easily defeated by adding entropy I invite you to give it a try.

I spent half a day messing around with it and I was very impressed by how robust it is. I couldn't get OpenAI to stop detecting their own SynthID without completely trashing the image.

Wouldn't synthid type watermarking fall under GDPR. Personally identifiable information attached by third party to content in the expectation that it would be published and trackable?

GDPR have lots of board exemption.

When some processing is required by eu or eu member state law, that processing doesn't need explicit consent.

One could also argue the watermark tracks the generated content, not the person

Reminds me of the micro patterns from inkjet printers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots

Spymarks are certainly not great for whistleblowers or anyone who doesn’t want to be persecuted for their words or affiliations. No matter where you stand on whatever issues, spymarks can be used against you and those you care about.

How do you spymark text that someone else wrote? You can't change the words or they'd notice