Technology

The problem here will be when companies start accusing smaller competitors/startups of using AI when they haven't used it at all.

It's getting harder and harder to tell when a photograph is AI generated or not. Sometimes they're obvious, but it makes you second guess even legitimate photographs of people because you noticed that they have 6 fingers or their face looks a little off.

A perfect example of this was posted recently where, 80-90% of people thought that the AI pictures were real pictures and that the Real pictures were AI generated.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240122054948/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/19/technology/artificial-intelligence-image-generators-faces-quiz.html

And where do you draw the line? What if I used AI to remove a single item in the background like a trashcan? Do I need to go back and watermark anything that's already been generated?

What if I used AI to upscale an image or colorize it? What if I used AI to come up with ideas, and then painted it in?

And what does this actually solve? Anyone running a misinformation campaign is just going to remove the watermark and it would give us a false sense of "this can't be AI, it doesn't have a watermark".

The actual text in the bill doesn't offer any answers. So far it's just a statement that they want to implement something "to allow consumers to easily determine whether images, audio, video, or text was created by generative artificial intelligence."

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240SB942