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Notes -
Fair warning to anyone inspired to pass off these images as your own:
They're watermarked. If you use AI Studio, they have a blue logo that's trivial to remove. But even so, including on the API, they're algorithmically watermarking outputs. It's almost certainly imperceptible to the naked eye, and resistant to common photo manipulation techniques after the fact.
If they're sharing with 3rd parties like Meta, expect Instagram to automatically throw up "AI generated" tags in the near future if it doesn't do so now. You can probably hedge your bets by editing or removing EXIF metadata, but don't say I didn't warn you.
The likes of Google and Meta are tolerating if not boosting the stream of clickbait slop that's being pumped onto the internet. Google lets pages from sites with millions of words blatantly copied off of chatgpt take the first result, and Scamazon is still printing and selling actual books with for actual money that contain the same. Zuccbook is putting AI slop images in my feed all the time.
These corps can nuke the vast majority of this with the most trivial of classifiers; this is even more obvious than nigerian prince scams. Yet they aren't even trying to take action. Yes I know it will be a cat and mouse game, but at least make them work for it.
Of course we don't know what the watermark is, but if we did attacking it is usually easy. I haven't seen any hidden watermarks that can't be defeated easily by direct attack
Wait, really? I don't think I've ever seen this; certainly not in the first result. Do you possibly mean in the ads? If not, do you have an example search term?
Maybe I'm just easy to fool, but I honestly don't think I've been impacted by (text) AI slop at all. I imagine it fills out the bodies of those recipe blogs no one reads, but I've been skipping over those since they were all artisanally crafted slop. I'm reasonably confident almost all the fiction I read was written by a real person -- as far as I know, SOTA text gen still isn't able to maintain continuity over tens of thousands of words. Maybe as an assistant for editing or filling out short exchanges, but at that point I wouldn't really call it slop. (And, if it is good enough that I really can't tell, why should I care?) I'm certainly not buying bottom-of-the-barrel self help ebooks off Amazon, or whatever trendy topic people are generating books for.
Here's a few sites I personally reported to google, all of which were in the first page of the search results and often the top result. I have a log because reporting a site gives a confirmation email, but unfortunately it doesn't contain the search terms so I don't have those.
These are of course malicious sites so be careful
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AI companies and governments seem far more concerned about the abuse of AI imagery/video than about text. This is an understandable stance, because people still haven't entirely recalibrated to not being able to trust clear, photorealistic imagery as we could within recent memory. It's not like photoshop hasn't been around for a while, but AI image slop is OOMs easier to mass produce.
I expect that Google, and especially OAI, are deeply concerned about being taken to task on the matter, even if I don't think they should be held liable for what users do with such broad tools, any more than I think Adobe needs to have its clay fired for political cartoons. There's been far more interest and pro-active effort in watermarking leading edge image gen as compared to mere words.
For a sophisticated user? Certainly. But the tricks that only somewhat knowledgeable people might try, such as obvious transformations like cropping, rotating, scaling, compression or color shifting probably won't work.
If Google hashes all their images and saves that, there are perceptually lossless hashing techniques that are troublesome to remove and which resist rather major transforms. That's all over the place, particularly for CP detection. It is unclear to me, at the very least, what lengths I'd need to go through to make the risk of being caught out minimal.
I expect @DaseindustriesLtd would be the person to ask on that front.
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