Watermarking in the Age of AI-generated Images

Let me tell you the story of the mysterious land of Digitopia, there lived a great artist named Henry, who was famous for his jaw-dropping digital creations. Suddenly one day, a mysterious AI entity Genai stepped into this town and started producing artwork similar to Henry’s but at a much faster rate. Henry was sad and lost hope as his creations started appearing under Genai’s name until he discovered the power of watermarking.

Watermarking is a way of embedding or hiding an artifact on a given image or text. This allowed Henry to protect his work from GenAI. This invisible artifact preserved his art's integrity and gave Henry a protective shield, preventing his original work from getting lost in the sea of Generative AI images.

The story of Henry and Genai throws light on our current world. Where digital artists coexist with AI-generated art. The increasing amount of AI-generated content necessitates the development of new watermarking techniques to draw a fine line between human creativity and technological advancement, protecting original art and artist from IP theft in the vast realm of the internet.

In this blog, we are first going to understand the full concept of watermarking and then review the paper titled: Tree-Ring Watermarks: Fingerprints for Diffusion Images that are Invisible and Robust

NOTE: If you already know about watermarking in general and only want to know about it in the context of AI-generated images/ Tree ring watermarks paper…