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.)

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.

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~!

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/

Weirdly the article doesn’t mention steganography. Arguably it isn’t quite the same, because the aim of steganography isn’t typically to add an identification, but something like “steganomark” would seem to be fitting.

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.

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.

> 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.

Can my friend print adversarial yellow doots and such?

Watermarking has referred to this "spy" use case for quite some time. Digital items purchased for download often have them, for example. Even before the rise of digital downloads, screeners for movies had them.

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?

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