Thoughts on Watermarking AI-Generated Content • David Stutz
Watermarking AI-generated content has the potential to address various problems that generative AI threatens to aggravate — misinformation, impersonation, copyright infringement, web pollution, etc. However, it is also controversial with many researchers and users worrying about reduced quality and questioning whether watermarking actually works and helps. In this article, I want to share some of my thoughts on how well watermarking works and whether it can actually help with our problems.
Over the past two years, I've been asked repeatedly at conferences and talks about my general opinion on watermarking AI-generated content. This is usually coupled with various concrete concerns that I like to categorize into three problems: misinformation at internet scale through social media, impersonation and deep fakes, and copyright issues. Of course, there are many other concers that might not perfectly fit these three categories, but I feel these are three big problems that researchers but also the public is afraid of. At this point, it is worth noting that these are already problems on the internet, but many researchers believe that generative AI can make them significantly worse.
The former usually asks whether watermarking works technically, that is, whether we can successfully watermark generated content and reliably detect it when it pops up in unexpected places on the internet. The latter then asks whether, assuming watermarking works, it already solves any of the above problems. So in this article, I want to share my opinion on both of these questions.
