YHK - yet another hacker news clone

No. The mark is hidden in the word choices.

See the demo in the article.

I wonder if we could have a real, open and direct democracy. All the models we have right now work via indirect clowns. Then again, looking at how some people vote, perhaps direct democracy can only work if people are clever.

The article calls out watermarks intended to deter counterfeiting as explicitly being not spymarks. Watermarks can tell you about the items marked, not about the person using/creating it.

One is proof of authenticity, other is tracking tool.

Bank notes are mainly protected by things that are hard to create without very specialized machines. You can't rely on anything hidden staying unknown and once you know a steganography scheme you can also control it.

> Tech like SynthID I see a net positive especially since it doesn't degrade text quality. I dream about a browser extension running at all times that makes text more translucent based on the confidence of LLM writing[0].

False confidence is a lot worse than no confidence. If such an extension ever becomes popular, people will take anything not marked as AI as gospel.

    I'm not convinced spymark is better than just "invisible watermarks", spymark to my ears sounds designed to be sound very negative when invisible watermarks are not always negative, e.g. the counterfeit bank note example.

    Tech like SynthID I see a net positive especially since it doesn't degrade text quality.

    I dream about a browser extension running at all times that makes text more translucent based on the confidence of LLM writing.

Might be technically more accurate, but it’s an inscrutable name with no chance of proliferation beyond technical people. If the goal is to rally people to your position, you need a name people can identify.

The concern is valid, but microphones are far worse. They're simpler, smaller, extremely sensitive to sound and an order of magnitude cheaper, both the mic itself as well as any spying with it.

It is possible to record voice using few bytes, to send later. It's further possible to transcribe cheaply into text, and analyze said text.

And mics are already everywhere, including in devices that do not need them, as well as speakers that can be rewired by software to act as microphones.

I think you may have an outdated view here

Because they have this pathway only they can access, their key and signature can be trusted. I’m not gonna trust Joe Schmoe’s signature that “No I didn’t use AI” unless I already trust Joe Schmoe (and in which case, he doesn’t need a watermark, I’ll just believe him when he says it).

TrojanStego: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20118 Improvement: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.09411

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-18/what-happens-if-prope...

Stop using links instead of words. Your comment is literally unreadable without going on to other websites.

> On that note, one way we can prevent it is to assert that all our content is byte-for-byte identical with the last known trusted stage of what we have produced

That doesn't help with things like the typical use of SynthID where the spymarking is done by the same process generating the content, so there is never a clean comparator. (It also wouldn't be useful anytime it is inplemented as part of a transformation—compression, etc. —step, for the same reason.)

This has been going on for a while with Facebook. They seem to embed custom metadata tags so that images shared outside the platform can be traced back:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31120222/iptc-metadata-a...

Or... add some noise. Just align the last bit of every pixel channel with a random bit sequence - and Bob's your uncle.

I spent half a day messing around with it and I was very impressed by how robust it is. I couldn't get OpenAI to stop detecting their own SynthID without completely trashing the image.

When some processing is required by eu or eu member state law, that processing doesn't need explicit consent.

One could also argue the watermark tracks the generated content, not the person

Text the whistleblower only reports on, well, if they got it from a computer system, there's already precedent of altering word choices, typos and punctuation in e-mails and memos to create unique per-recipient or per-recipient-group versions, which allows companies to trace leaked transcripts reported by press back to source of the leak.

So I’m not writing off tech as a whole just the adtech companies being a lost cause.

I still use IRC on the daily, but someone mentions Discord at least once a month on there, and sometimes tries to whisk people away to that side. There are also people hooking up LLMs to IRC bots and joining them to channels without permission, then when you complain or kick/ban their bot you're somehow treated as the rude one. It's very hard to entirely get away from all the crap anymore.

Digital Rights Management isn't just about restricting what you can do with the content, which is often futile anyway. Another way companies can manage their rights is by making sure pirates are properly identified and caught.