AI Watermarking 101: Tools and Techniques

Back to Articles AI Watermarking 101: Tools and Techniques Published February 26, 2024 Update on GitHub Upvote 27 +21 Sasha Luccioni sasha Follow Yacine Jernite yjernite Follow Derek Thomas derek-thomas Follow Emily Witko EmilyWitko Follow Ezi Ozoani Ezi Follow Josef Fukano JJoe206 Follow Vaibhav Srivastav reach-vb Follow Brigitte Tousignant BrigitteTousi Follow Margaret Mitchell meg Follow In recent months, we've seen multiple news stories involving ‘deepfakes’, or AI-generated content: from images of Taylor Swift to videos of Tom Hanks and recordings of US President Joe Biden. Whether they are selling products, manipulating images of people without their consent, supporting phishing for private information, or creating misinformation materials intended to mislead voters, deepfakes are increasingly being shared on social media platforms. This enables them to be quickly propagated and have a wider reach and therefore, the potential to cause long-lasting damage. In this blog post, we will describe approaches to carry out watermarking of AI-generated content, discuss their pros and cons, and present some of the tools available on the Hugging Face Hub for adding/detecting watermarks. What is watermarking and how does it work? Figure 1: OpenAI’s Dall-E 2 included a visible watermark composed of 5 blocks of different colors in the bottom right corner. Source: instagram.com/dailydall.e Watermarking is a method designed to mark content in order to convey additional information, s...