← Back to context

Comment by andrewmcwatters

3 days ago

I wonder how it stands up to feature analysis.

"Generate a pure white image." "Generate a pure black image." Channel diff, extract steganographic signature for analysis.

I've been looking into this. There seems to be some mostly-repeating 2D pattern in the LSB of the generated images. The magnitude of the noise seems to be larger in the pure black image vs pure white image. My main goal is to doctor a real image to flag as positive for SynthID, but I imagine if you smoothed out the LSB, you might be able to make images (especially very bright images) no longer flag as SynthID? Of course, it's possible there's also noise in here from the image-generation process...

Gemini really doesn't like generating pure-white images but you can ask it to generate a "photograph of a pure-white image with a black border" and then crop it. So far I've just been looking at pure images and gradients, it's possible that more complex images have SynthID embedded in a more complicated way (e.g. a specific pattern in an embedding space).

I just tried this idea, and it looks like it isn't that simple.

> "Generate a pure white image."

It refused no matter how I phrased it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> "Generate a pure black image."

It did give me one. In a new chat, I asked Gemini to detect SynthID with "@synthid". It responded with:

> The image contains too little information to make a diagnosis regarding whether it was created with Google AI. It is primarily a solid black field, and such content typically lacks the necessary data for SynthID to provide a definitive result.

Further research: Does a gradient trigger SynthID? IDK, I have to get back to work.