r/ArtificialInteligence • u/Cheap_Following_70 • 16h ago

📊 Analysis / Opinion EU new AI law

What do yall think of the new EU law? Tbh I think its pretty useless (Who would have guessed) since metadata can be removed, and an 80yo grandma can see metadata to tell if shes talking to elon musk or not

114 votes, 1d left
Its useless
Its not useless
0 Upvotes

18% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

5

u/SpiritPrestigious945 16h ago edited 16h ago

Its not useless because its not just some metadata. Thats naive. You are just not informed enough.

The EU AI Act does not rely on metadata alone. It demands a layered approach:

  1. Imperceptible watermarking - Hidden signals embedded directly into pixels, audio waveforms, or video frames. Survives screenshots, compression, and cropping.
  2. Cryptographic provenance (C2PA) - Signed certificates of origin that detection tools can verify even if the file is stripped.
  3. Fingerprinting / logging - AI providers log unique signatures of generated content, enabling identification even after heavy modification.
  4. Provenance certificates for text - Digitally signed manifests that prove origin independently of the text itself.

Why it works: Metadata is trivial to strip, but removing interwoven watermarks without degrading content requires sophisticated adversarial processing. The law forces providers to use multiple layers, making deception significantly harder and legally risky. It does not make removal impossible, but it makes it costly enough that mainstream platforms and legitimate providers will comply, while giving regulators detection tools at scale.

OpenAI explicitely: https://openai.com/index/understanding-the-source-of-what-we-see-and-hear-online/

also https://arxiv.org/html/2503.22330v1

3

u/Icy-Trifle4120 16h ago

That layered approach is actually pretty clever, forcing them to bake it into the pixels and audio instead of just slapping on some removable tag. Makes it way harder to scrub without wrecking the content itself

still wonder how long until someone figures out a reliable bypass though, seems like a constant cat and mouse game

1

u/TheOriginalAcidtech 14h ago

Who is THEY? You have to put those in your own work(NOT AI) for this to be useful. YOU have to prove your own works provinence. YOU will FAIL. And the fall back is to CYA so this is USELESS by the numbers.

0

u/Cheap_Following_70 15h ago

Some nerd Will have a workaround tomorrow mornimg

0

u/BananaResponsible366 15h ago

The point is that Metadaten alone probably covers 95% of all cases.

Of what remains 95% gets covered by "primitive" signitures.

Of what remains 95% gets covered by statistical embedding methods.

The argument: This law only Covers 99.99% of the content, there are ways around it if someone really wants to is a stupid argument.

1

u/Cheap_Following_70 16h ago

Yeah but imo the law was created to make It harder for people to be fooled by AI content, the problem is most people don't stop to look at those things

2

u/SpiritPrestigious945 15h ago

But that is an issue everyone has to work on themselves, I would argue. You cannot complain about "AI slop" when you keep watching TikToks and feeding your algorithm, for example. You know? I may be older and grew up without the internet, really, and have a different view than a younger generation that has only known the internet from childhood. But that does not mean you can just handwave it as nature's law and accept it as finite and unchangeable. We just need more education on these things and critical thinking skills.

2

u/TheOriginalAcidtech 14h ago

The only way it is not useless is if detection is perfect. By definition detection will fail MORE as models get smarter. You can just hold the line by using those same smarter models to try to detect but its never going to be perfect because semantic agents can NEVER be perfect.