Big Tech says AI watermarks could curb misinformation, but they're easy to sidestep

Kelsea Petersen / NBC News

NBC News
Watermarking has been floated by Big Tech as one of the most promising methods to combat the escalating AI misinformation problem online. But so far, the results don’t seem promising, according to experts and a review of misinformation conducted by NBC News.

Adobe’s general counsel and trust officer Dana Rao wrote in a February blog post that Adobe’s C2PA watermarking standard, which Meta and other Big Tech companies have signed onto, would be instrumental in educating the public about misleading AI. 

“With more than two billion voters expected to participate in elections around the world this year, advancing C2PA’s mission has never been more critical,” Rao wrote.

The technologies are only in their infancy and in a limited state of deployment but, already, watermarking has proven to be easy to bypass.

Many contemporary watermarking technologies meant to identify AI-generated media use two components: an invisible tag contained in an image’s metadata and a visible label superimposed on an image.

But both invisible watermarks, which can take the form of microscopic pixels or metadata, and visible labels can be removed, sometimes through rudimentary methods such as screenshotting and cropping. 

So far, major social media and tech companies have not strictly mandated or enforced that labels be put on AI-generated or AI-edited content. MORE