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Evading Watermark-Based Detection of AI-Generated Content (arxiv.org)
2 points by redbell on Nov 1, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Watermarks are hidden signals added to AI-made images so detectors can spot them. Adding a tiny, invisible change to a watermarked image makes detectors miss it while keeping the picture looking the same, with smaller changes than compression, blur, or brightness tweaks.

Abstract · Evading Watermark based Detection of AI-Generated Content

A generative AI model can generate extremely realistic-looking content, posing growing challenges to the authenticity of information. To address the challenges, watermark has been leveraged to detect AI-generated content. Specifically, a watermark is embedded into an AI-generated content before it is released. A content is detected as AI-generated if a similar watermark can be decoded from it. In this work, we perform a systematic study on the robustness of such watermark-based AI-generated content detection. We focus on AI-generated images. Our work shows that an attacker can post-process a watermarked image via adding a small, human-imperceptible perturbation to it, such that the post-processed image evades detection while maintaining its visual quality. We show the effectiveness of our attack both theoretically and empirically. Moreover, to evade detection, our adversarial post-processing method adds much smaller perturbations to AI-generated images and thus better maintain their visual quality than existing popular post-processing methods such as JPEG compression, Gaussian blur, and Brightness/Contrast. Our work shows the insufficiency of existing watermark-based detection of AI-generated content, highlighting the urgent needs of new methods. Our code is publicly available: https://github.com/zhengyuan-jiang/WEvade.

Zhengyuan Jiang, Jinghuai Zhang, Neil Zhenqiang Gong
arXiv:2305.03807 · cs.LG, cs.CR, cs.CV · submitted May 5, 2023 · updated Nov 8, 2023
abstract · pdf · html · To appear in ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2023

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