Watermarking tool to prevent AI image editing can easily be thwarted

A proposed digital watermark to prevent artificial intelligence (AI) models from altering real photographs can be thwarted simply by saving the image as a JPEG file, say researchers, suggesting that managing the rise of photorealistic deepfakes will be harder than initially thought.

While AIs can generate images from text prompts alone, such as those of the Pope wearing a puffer jacket that recently went viral, they can also be used to modify existing photos, creating realistic pictures of events that never happened. A …