Comment by ethmarks

> now you're left with the bajillion other "grey market" models that won't give a damn about that.

Exactly. When the barrier to entry for training a okay-ish AI model (not SOTA, obviously) is only a few thousand compute hours on H100s, you couldn't possibly hope to police the training of 100% of new models. Not to mention that lots of existing models are already out there are fully open-source. There will always be AI models that don't adhere to watermark regulations, especially if they were created a country that doesn't enforce your regulations.

You can't hope to solve the problem of non-watermarked AI completely. And by solving it partially by mandating that the big AI labs add a unified watermark, you condition people to be even more susceptible to AI images because "if it was AI, it would have a watermark". It's truly a no-win situation.