alt Hacker NewsYeah, but it's better than nothing.
People underestimate the value of rules that only take malice and a little knowledge to break.
And they tend to exaggerate that underestimation if they... don't like the rule.
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Yes! How many people have been caught committing fraud because they used a modern word processor and fonts to forge old documents? How many leaks have occurred because people failed to redact documents correctly, despite there being easy to use tools for this very purpose? How many people neglected to strip sensitive EXIF information from images they share (before websites started doing it for them)? How many people flat out post evidence of their crimes on social media?
Yes, this watermark will be easy to strip. It is still valuable for the vast majority of times where people just don't.
It's worse than nothing because it gives people the false impression that there exists a system they can trust to tell them what information is authentic and what isn't. The incentive for governments and other interests to undermine that system to push false narratives and disinformation is just too great.
Exactly. If this works on pull requests, for instance, it'd be really useful for projects trying to do a first-pass filter to close slop spam.
I even see the Gemini diamond watermark on so many fake social media profile pictures. You could ask an LLM to find a github project that removes/inpaints those watermarks and be done with it. Or you could just use the API, which doesn't stamp the visible diamond on it (just the invisible synthID).
Most people are generally lazy. They upload text to LinkedIn full of "genuine", "honest" and "load-bearing".