Copied Act would make removing AI digital watermarks illegal

Absolutely terrible idea. The idea that making a copy of art is somehow theft has lead to nothing but bad outcomes, artificial scarcity, and whining from wealthy institutions complaining about their imagined profits. Intellectual property is one of the most distasteful oxymorons of our age.

Provable how?

What's an AI watermark?

What's a work of art?

How inundated by works containing supposedly unique digital signatures nonetheless susceptible to collision attacks do they wish to suffer?

The Law cannot match Mathematics in formulation, nor can it match it in meaning.

I wish mathematicians spent more time educating legislators so the rest of us can think and communicate in peace and clarity.

I don't know if I'm reading this correctly. If this applies to images, and if these watermarks are something like a comment stored in the file's metadata, wouldn't this effectively make it illegal to make a thumbnail of an image? Or to screenshot an image? Or convert it to a .bmp?

> The bill also directs NIST to develop cybersecurity measures to prevent tampering with provenance and watermarking on AI content.

So somehow NIST would have to develop a cybersecurity measure to stop me from making an AI generated image and just screenshotting it, discarding any metadata. I'm not sure how realistic this is.

If the watermark were embedded into the actual pixels of the image then of course it'd be preserved by a screenshot, but my understanding is that those watermarks are not very robust to the image being resized, compressed or cropped

At the end of the day you can also just take a picture of an AI-generated image on your screen using a camera (bonus points if you're in a future where cameras embed digital signatures to verify the image is authentic and not AI generated)

Seems like ambitious legislation to request something from a standards agency and then keep lawing as if said standard existed.

The Content Origin Protection and Integrity from Edited and Deepfaked Media Act (COPIED Act) would direct the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to create standards and guidelines that help prove the origin of content and detect synthetic content, like through watermarking. It also directs the agency to create security measures to prevent tampering and requires AI tools for creative or journalistic content to let users attach information about their origin and prohibit that information from being removed. Under the bill, such content also could not be used to train AI models.

The original title is more clear: The AI-focused COPIED Act would make removing digital watermarks illegal.

I thought the headline was indicating it would be illegal to remove watermarks from content generated by LLMs.

That's not going to work, fellas. Cute idea though. Keep trying to put the cat back in the bag, I love this creative energy.

> like through watermarking.

Good luck enforcing that in open source tools.

> Such content also could not be used to train AI models.

And... how would you make sure it won’t happen?

I don’t think they know how the digital world works, let alone generative AI. You might regulate big companies, but never the community, not to mention companies that are outside of the US that can still access and train their models on such materials.