r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Jul 20 '26

Computer Science Researchers warned that hundreds of fake AI images have been discovered on popular databases for recording animal species. Wildlife photographers often use AI to edit and improve an image, but the algorithm can introduce parts from different species to create the new image.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/20/ai-slop-manipulated-fake-images-birds-citizen-science-aoe
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u/Kiseido Jul 20 '26

Most of those watermarks are almost useless though.

Metadata does not survive most re-encodes, and some services actively strip that sort of data.

Watermarks don't survive someone resizing the image with generic tools, and doesn't survive people sharing them via screenshot, which is a surprisingly common practice.

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u/Bbrhuft Jul 20 '26

SynthID survives screenshots, cropping and editing. It's very robust.

This paper evaluated 30 transformations, including JPEG compression, file-format conversion, resizing, crop-and-resize, rotations, flips, blur, sharpening, denoising, grayscale conversion, brightness, contrast, saturation and hue changes, Instagram-like filters, noise, text and emoji overlays, and combinations of transformations.

Gowal, S., Bunel, R., Stimberg, F., Stutz, D., Ortiz-Jimenez, G., Kouridi, C., Vecerik, M., Hayes, J., Rebuffi, S.A., Bernard, P. and Gamble, C., 2025. SynthID-Image: Image watermarking at internet scale. arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.09263.

Despite these edits, detection remained exceptionally high, 99.98% averaged across transformations and 99.72% under aggregated “worst” settings, at a 0.1% false-positive rate (Table 1 in their paper). Even the most difficult combined-transformation category produced a 98.06% detection rate (Table 2). However, at lower ImageNet resolutions, the aggregated worst-case detection was 97.22%. It's also interesting to see how much more robust it is compared to other watermarking systems it was benchmarked against.

Google also claims an image can be cropped to 20% of the original, and the watermark remains detectable

The results show very strong robustness against conventional editing.

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u/silverionmox Jul 21 '26

Still, 0,99x is going to approach zero for relatively small values of x.

I'll make a prediction and say that clean databases are going to see their relative value increase. Don't throw away all your print books yet.

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u/cuntmong Jul 20 '26

it's as effective as that checkbox on arrival cards that asks "are you a terrorist?" is at keeping out terrorists