Zhao et al. 2023 showed any imperceptible watermark is provably removable by generative regeneration: pass the image through an img2img or VAE, the model reconstructs it visually identical but starts from a different latent. Watermark gone. SynthID and similar schemes do hold up well against normal sharing: recompression, crops, color tweaks, Twitter's pipeline. That covers most users. But the asymmetry is stuck — normally a GPU and a bit of motivation should be enough to strip it. Right? Got a tool to share? ;-)

I feel like this idea comes up often and in my opinion it doesn't solve anything. Take a picture of an AI image and you've made this approach useless. Which then goes to the argument of "well you'll see it's a picture of a picture" to which I will say there are plenty of ways to make this not appear so, and the ultimate form of this argument is that you can eventually project light directly into the photosensors, or otherwise hack the input between the photosensors and the rest of whatever digital magic that turns light into a JPG on your phone.

The paper they published last year goes over some of these transformations: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.09263

It's going to mess up accountability.

Some politician will be recorded doing something & he'll have his people release a thousand photos/videos of him doing crimes. And they'll say, look, it's a smear campaign.

This is just one stupid example, but people will have better schemes.

Also global coordinated releases of fake content and hypertargeted possibly abusive content. Virtual kidnappings will take off, automated & scaled.

Hopefully the arms race will balance out with improved AI image detection, but I can see how that will never be guaranteed to be reliable.