Open source fights black boxes; 200 images unlock a hundred-billion-level watermark system. This is very cyberpunk.

CryptoWorld News reported that XBIT DEX said that a developer, Alosh Denny, has cracked Google’s AI watermark detection system, which has embedded invisible watermarks in over 100 billion AI-generated contents. Using only 200 sample images and some mathematical methods, Denny reverse-engineered the system and built “reverse-synthid,” an open-source tool designed to remove watermarks until detection fails. While removing nearly 91% of the watermarks’ spectral features, it achieved a 16% evasion rate with almost no visible quality loss. The project has been open-sourced and has received more than 4,100 stars on GitHub.