[HN Gopher] Cryptography may offer a solution to the AI-labeling...
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       Cryptography may offer a solution to the AI-labeling problem
        
       Author : rntn
       Score  : 30 points
       Date   : 2023-07-31 17:17 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.technologyreview.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.technologyreview.com)
        
       | Thoeu388 wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       | kp1197 wrote:
       | This seems like an obvious solve. Produce cameras with HSM
       | (hardware security modules) that cryptographically sign the image
       | using the existing certificate infrastructure. Get browser
       | vendors to visually indicate signed images. Now you have a
       | "class" of images that are known to be produced by taking a photo
       | with a verified device.
        
         | noodlesUK wrote:
         | Except you suddenly lose the ability to resize, edit, crop etc
         | without having to have a "trusted editor".
         | 
         | And the analog hole is still there. You can always just point
         | your expensive HSM equipped camera at a high quality print
         | (like a film telecine) of an edited image and it'll have a good
         | signature.
        
           | kp1197 wrote:
           | Great point on the analogue hack. But I think it's a perfect-
           | is-enemy-of-good situation. There is currently no such thing
           | as digitally verifiable media. If such a thing existed, it
           | would at least partially shove the cat back into the bag
           | (maybe people would abuse the cameras with the HSMs in this
           | way, but its one step better than having all images with no
           | verifiability). Whats more, Photoshop has existed for 25
           | years - and convincing Hollywood SFX for 30+ - so clearly it
           | is deep fakes specifically that are the nascent threat.
           | Doesn't HSM at least help address low effort deep fakes from
           | people without HSM enabled cameras? Also, you could put in a
           | depth range sensor and make the depth reading part of the
           | signed payload.
        
       | FartyMcFarter wrote:
       | What if you take a photo of a photo, or hack the camera to feed
       | in images to the sensor?
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | JimtheCoder wrote:
         | That is slow, and slow is not that bad.
         | 
         | Gen AI at high speeds is the bigger issue, IMO...
        
       | NoImmatureAdHom wrote:
       | If you want to prove provenance without centralization of power
       | like certificate authorities, you could do it with a blockchain.
       | I'm sure someone has implemented this.
       | 
       | Alice wants to prove to everyone that she took a photo. Or, at
       | least, she wants to attest that it is hers from a given time on.
       | 
       | 1) Alice takes photo at t=0
       | 
       | 2) Hash is calculated of photo
       | 
       | 3) Hash is signed with Alice's private key
       | 
       | 4) Signed hash is uploaded to Ethereum blockchain (probably
       | bundled with thousands of others to save money, or on some other
       | cheaper/faster blockchain)
       | 
       | 5) Bob can verify that Alice had this photo starting at t=0
       | 
       | Combined with other information (like "This is a photo of events
       | that happened on Tuesday starting around 11AM"), this could be
       | useful in the context of journalism or whatever's replacing it on
       | the web.
        
         | avmich wrote:
         | It doesn't help with determining how Alice took the photo -
         | with her camera or with her version of Stable Diffusion. Only
         | that at t=0 Alice uploaded the hash of the photo she had before
         | it.
        
           | n3t wrote:
           | Exactly.
           | 
           | What your parent described is a type of trusted timestamping
           | and one doesn't need blockchain to implement it.
           | 
           | [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping
        
       | miohtama wrote:
       | > What's more, since C2PA relies on creators to opt in, the
       | protocol doesn't really address the problem of bad actors using
       | AI-generated content.
       | 
       | ... or how to waste money on useless regulation and fear
       | mongering. As long as people have access to open source tooling
       | to edit JPEGs, there is no way any watermarking system works
       | towards political goals. But I am sure consulting and tech
       | companies working on the project are keen to do forced sales of
       | their software.
        
         | BSEdlMMldESB wrote:
         | solution: make sure people lose access to such "dangerous"
         | tooling
         | 
         | this will surely make Adobe stock rise even further. it's a
         | win-win! (and yet... I have a sensation we all lose)
         | 
         | /angry sarcasm.... I just keep reading awful news lately
        
       | fluoridation wrote:
       | It seems to me like the opposite solution is more robust. Rather
       | than putting digital watermarks on AI-generated content, put them
       | on human-generated content, and you can treat anything that
       | doesn't have one as possibly AI-generated.
        
         | JohnFen wrote:
         | How is that more robust? It seems to me it would be more robust
         | to have it be on AI-generated content, where it can be done
         | automatically. Also, there are fewer AI generators than there
         | are people, so the total effort would be lower.
         | 
         | It's AI that's presenting the problem here, why burden
         | uninvolved others to provide a solution?
        
           | kouru225 wrote:
           | Because AI media generation can scale up way past human media
           | generation, and probably will.
        
           | fluoridation wrote:
           | Because it's much easier to remove a cryptographic signature
           | than it is to falsify one, and there's a greater incentive in
           | passing a generated file as being created by a human than the
           | opposite.
        
             | JohnFen wrote:
             | But it's a lot harder for people to do this than for a
             | computer, which means people largely won't.
             | 
             | Also, I still don't see how it's fair and reasonable to put
             | this sort of burden on innocent others when they aren't the
             | ones making the problem.
        
               | fluoridation wrote:
               | With software support it doesn't have to be any harder
               | than just saving a file. You set up your keystore once
               | and then your production software does the rest. I'm sure
               | there's a lot of popular digital artists who'd like for
               | people to be able distinguish their art from generated
               | stuff that imitates their personal style.
               | 
               | >Also, I still don't see how it's fair and reasonable to
               | put this sort of burden on innocent others when they
               | aren't the ones making the problem.
               | 
               | Reality is what it is. There's no point in arguing about
               | what's fair or not fair, what matters is what solves the
               | problem. If you were fighting your evil clone and I had
               | to shoot the fake one, would you say "why should I have
               | to prove I'm myself? My fake should just turn himself
               | in", knowing you're risking getting shot because he'll do
               | the exact same thing?
        
               | JohnFen wrote:
               | > I'm sure there's a lot of popular digital artists who'd
               | like for people to be able distinguish their art from
               | generated stuff that imitates their personal style.
               | 
               | Sure, and this sort of approach makes sense for them. I'm
               | thinking of everyone else. Not artists, but ordinary
               | people doing ordinary things.
               | 
               | > what matters is what solves the problem.
               | 
               | True, and fair enough. But I don't think putting this
               | burden on humans would actually solve this problem,
               | because not enough humans can or will do this.
        
               | fluoridation wrote:
               | Ordinary people just send files to people they know and
               | have no interest in proving the authorship of those
               | files, nor are the people who receive them interesting in
               | verifying the authorship. Hell, I have GPG set up on at
               | least two computers and I've never sent a signed message
               | to another person.
               | 
               | This is a problem only for people who publish content and
               | want to make sure everyone knows it was _they_ who made
               | something, and for people who consume /use content and
               | want to make sure that a given piece of content was made
               | by a human.
        
               | JohnFen wrote:
               | > This is a problem only for people who publish content
               | and want to make sure everyone knows it was they who made
               | something, and for people who consume/use content and
               | want to make sure that a given piece of content was made
               | by a human.
               | 
               | Right, which includes an awful lot of ordinary people.
               | 
               | But if the proposal is intended only to cover the more
               | visible people, that's fair enough for now. We still need
               | a more general solution.
        
           | TJSomething wrote:
           | In addition to siblings notes, we need to assume that a large
           | chunk of AI generated content will be generated by bad faith
           | actors using custom implementations. If you're generating a
           | lot of images, it's going to be cheaper to run your own
           | infrastructure.
           | 
           | Also, many digital asset management pipelines are homebrew
           | hacks built into bespoke CMSs and are terrible at maintaining
           | metadata.
        
         | kouru225 wrote:
         | Been saying this for awhile. As dumb as some nfts are, I do
         | think that having a public registry that logs a paper trail for
         | all human-generated media is a necessary solution in response
         | to AI.
        
         | maarten3 wrote:
         | Working on this: https://proofivy.com/
        
       | t3rabytes wrote:
       | Better title: "AI companies propose using C2PA to identify AI-
       | generated content"
        
         | klabb3 wrote:
         | TIL that's the standard for when eg a camera signs a photo, and
         | then editing tools can further sign to continue the chain of
         | provenance.
         | 
         | My money is at (a) this won't be universally used and (b)
         | "laundering" AI content is just about removing the signature,
         | and nobody will ever care. In fact, the signatures will be
         | removed unintentionally by copying, downscaling etc.
         | 
         | Even if all media editors and viewers of sorts were to use it,
         | like some sort of authoritarian wet dream, breaking that DRM
         | would be top priority for hackers and since many if not most
         | keys are client side it'd be trivial to crack and spoof
         | anything.
        
       | TrueDuality wrote:
       | This appears to simply be a tool that adds additional signed
       | metadata to the content which is trivial to strip from the file,
       | allowing malicious users to not have that "AI generated" label
       | show up... Optional metadata is not really a protection mechanism
       | except in walled garden ecosystems.
        
         | devonkim wrote:
         | Isn't this what part of the point of cryptographically signed
         | artifacts such as via GPG is for anyway? Historically Linux
         | package managers explicitly avoided using TLS / SSL for
         | distributing binaries over networks because they wanted the
         | userbase to build a habit of verifying signatures and checksums
         | provided by the distro maintainers at every step of the process
         | as part of the shared responsibility model.
        
         | flangola7 wrote:
         | Google the fingerprinting and traitor tracing techniques used
         | by media studios. If a user screen records their HBO stream, or
         | uses a cam in a theater, the studio can identify exactly which
         | user it was streaming to or exactly which time and theater
         | showing it was recorded in. This fingerprint is resistant to
         | image warping/flipping, bitrate downsampling, image
         | desaturation, cropping, frame drops, added noise, and nearly
         | everything else.
        
       | HNx1 wrote:
       | I did share it in a separate thread, but I developed an
       | adaptation of the logit biasing idea that directly integrates
       | identity proof into the language model output. I think it very
       | directly addresses the challenge of language/diffusion model
       | authenticity.
       | 
       | github.com/HNx1/IdentityLM
        
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       (page generated 2023-08-01 23:02 UTC)