What if the watermark becomes a latent variable that's indirectly learnt by a subsequent model trained on its generated data? They will have to constantly vary the mark to keep it up to date. Are we going to see Merkle tree watermark database like we see for certificate transparency? YC, here's your new startup idea.
I can imagine some kind of public/private key encrypted watermark system to ensure the veracity / provenance of media created via LLMs and their associated user accounts.
There's many reasons why people are concerned about AI's training data becoming AI generated. The usual one is that the training will diverge, but this is another good one.
Camera makers are all working on adding cryptographic signatures to captured images to prove their provenance. The current standard embeds this in metadata, but if they start watermarking the images themselves then skipping watermarked images during training would quickly become an issue
