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Posted by ComputerGuru 8 hours ago

MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID(xusheng.dev)
498 points | 200 commentspage 3
petjuh 6 hours ago|
How resistant is it to dithering? Can you just add +-1 randomly to each pixel r,g and b values and throw it off?
red_admiral 5 hours ago|
Probably not, if it's this kind of thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_hashing
naniel 7 hours ago||
awesome breakdown of the process you took. reverse-engineering is crazy now with AI. IP is dead

this also reminds me of what got me hooked on CS in the first place: a simple java steganography app in cmsc150

initramfs 7 hours ago||
Thanks Microsoft, for adding my signature so I won't have to claim authorship when it ends up in a museum in 200 years, and the NSA archives are declassified for art historians filing a FOIA in 2226, who find out, "yep, it was from his PC."
Scaled 5 hours ago|
Ms paint slop being hung in a museum? Now that's a dystopian future!
initramfs 4 hours ago||
No, I wasn't suggesting that. I was saying that if there was digital art (human made) aesthetically significant that a curator would want to display it in a museum, Microsoft's GUID supplied to a data collection agency would make it possible to retrieve if ever/whenever that data were declassified (assuming it isn't purged)

It's possible a very bad curator with a terrible taste in art might select slop to display, but I was refering to "fine art" or at least finer art that is digital.

kibwen 5 hours ago||
Until proven otherwise via open-source audits and reproducible binaries, you should assume that all commercial photo editing software is embedding watermarks in any way they can get away with. This includes the professional software that you pay quite expensive licenses for. You should also assume that even if they're not today, they will eventually be coerced into doing so, in the same way that printers embed tracking dots.
nemomarx 8 hours ago||
Interesting. I really didn't think watermarks would end up going anywhere, but maybe with enough adoption we can have easy ai generated content flagging after all?
dotancohen 7 hours ago|
Not every generative AI model will watermark. Especially not adversarial and disinformation models.
AaronAPU 7 hours ago|||
So as usual, exactly the things you want it to work on it won’t.
jambalaya8 7 hours ago||
I mean, workarounds wouldn't be hard, just annoying, anyway. Like an extra step or two (take a screenshot, change the image format, wipe the metadata; or print, take photo with camera, clean up in something like gimp, same other steps).
deltoidmaximus 5 hours ago|||
It actually might make the new horrible world even worse. Imagine the populace getting used to a AI image detector flagging things as fake using this fairly easily defeated GUID marker system. Most people are just making memes or cat videos and don't even try to remove this so eventually the populace starts to believe these things actually work.

Now some one slightly more sophisticated starts creating deepfakes of a woman and uploading them or fabricating video of an political event without this marker. The subject protests it's fake and AI generated but a loud majority of ignorants feed it into Microsoft AI detector and call you a liar and say it's confirmed real. Most people don't know any better and eat it up because a computer said so.

phendrenad2 6 hours ago||
This muddle of an article makes it totally unclear to me if this GUID is attached by the AI generation call or every image I edit in MS Paint. I'm going to assume the former unless they release a clarification.

Edit: Actually trivial to test, just save an image of all black and see if it suddenly has other values on save.

red_admiral 5 hours ago||
Assuming the watermark works like the upcoming AI watermark for text, then it uses the content's entropy to embed the information. An all-black image doesn't have much entropy, so it's unlikely you'd find anything.
david_shaw 5 hours ago||
> Edit: Actually trivial to test, just save an image of all black and see if it suddenly has other values on save.

Did it?

pmkary 5 hours ago||
With every new thing Microsoft goes trying so hard to come out as the good person, but they just cannot help themselves but to inject their evil. It had to be changed with Nadla coming, but their enshitification is just keeps getting worse and worse. What on Earth is this.
rnd0 2 hours ago||
Ya know, this would probably be pointless but if I were a programmer (I'm not -and refuse to be a vibe coder) I'd probably just grab appropriate libraries and make my own replacements for this shit. GLTK+ (?) is an obvious choice to use for recreating mspaint, and to replace notepad -I was told making a simple editor was an excercise they have you do when you learn programming to begin with?

I already replaced the 'solitaire' games suite with pysol running on WSL2 and it's a vast improvement!

tldr -if MS is going to screw us, why don't we mitigate it by using replacements?

megous 5 hours ago|
Solved by not using closed source SW, period.
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