• Yes, it’s getting all too easy to generate completely realistic photo images using Google’s Pixel 9 and Magic Editor/Reimagine functionality. This has the potential to become a dangerous tool, especially without proper watermarking. See this article in the Verge. An excerpt:
“The industry’s proposed AI image watermarking standard is mired in the usual standards slog, and Google’s own much-vaunted AI watermarking system was nowhere in sight when The Verge tried out the Pixel 9’s Magic Editor. The photos that are modified with the Reimagine tool simply have a line of removable metadata added to them. (The inherent fragility of this kind of metadata was supposed to be addressed by Google’s invention of the theoretically unremovable SynthID watermark.) Google told us that the outputs of Pixel Studio — a pure prompt generator that is closer to DALL-E — will be tagged with a SynthID watermark; ironically, we found the capabilities of the Magic Editor’s Reimagine tool, which modifies existing photos, were much more alarming.”