Sora 2 Watermark Removers Flood the Web

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Sora 2, Open AI's new AI video generator, puts a visual watermark on every video it generates. But the little cartoon-eyed cloud logo meant to help people distinguish between reality and AI-generated bullshit is easy to remove and there are half a dozen websites that will help anyone do it in a few minutes. A simple search for 'sora watermark' on any social media site will return links to places where a user can upload a Sora 2 video and remove the watermark. 404 Media tested three of these websites, and they all seamlessly removed the watermark from the video in a matter of seconds.

Hany Farid, a UC Berkeley professor and an expert on digitally manipulated images, said he's not shocked at how fast people were able to remove watermarks from Sora 2 videos. 'It was predictable,' he said. 'Sora isn't the first AI model to add visible watermarks and this isn't the first time that within hours of these models being released, someone released code or a service to remove these watermarks.' According to Farid, Open AI is decent at employing strategies like watermarks, content credentials, and semantic guardrails to manage malicious use. But it doesn't matter. 'It is just a matter of time before someone else releases a model without these safeguards,' he said.

Both [Rachel Tobac, CEO of SocialProof Security] and Farid said that the ease at which people can remove watermarks from AI-generated content wasn't a reason to stop using watermarks. 'Using a watermark is the bare minimum for an organization attempting to minimize the harm that their AI video and audio tools create,' Tobac said, but she thinks the companies need to go further. 'We will need to see a broad partnership between AI and Social Media companies to build in detection for scams/harmful content and AI labeling not only on the AI generation side, but also on the upload side for social media platforms. Social Media companies will also need to build large teams to manage the likely influx of AI generated social media video and audio content to detect and limit the reach for scammy and harmful content.' 'I'd like to know what OpenAI is doing to respond to how people are finding ways around their safeguards,' Farid said. 'Will they adapt and strengthen their guardrails? Will they ban users from their platforms? If they are not aggressive here, then this is going to end badly for us all.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.