Watermarking for AI Content Detection: A Review on Text, Visual, and Audio Modalities

Published: 06 Mar 2025, Last Modified: 16 Apr 2025WMARK@ICLR2025EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Track: long paper (up to 9 pages)
Keywords: watermarking, AI-generated content, detection, text, visual, audio
TL;DR: A practical survey of watermarking techniques for detecting AI-generated text, images, and audio, evaluating their effectiveness, robustness, and key challenges.
Abstract: The rapid advancement of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has revolutionized content creation across text, visual, and audio domains, simultaneously introducing significant risks such as misinformation, identity fraud, and content manipulation. This paper presents a practical survey of watermarking techniques designed to proactively detect GenAI content. We develop a structured taxonomy categorizing watermarking methods for text, visual, and audio modalities and critically evaluate existing approaches based on their effectiveness, robustness, and practicality. Additionally, we identify key challenges, including resistance to adversarial attacks, lack of standardization across different content types, and ethical considerations related to privacy and content ownership. Finally, we discuss potential future research directions aimed at enhancing watermarking strategies to ensure content authenticity and trustworthiness. This survey serves as a foundational resource for researchers and practitioners seeking to understand and advance watermarking techniques for AI-generated content detection.
Presenter: ~Lele_Cao1
Format: Yes, the presenting author will definitely attend in person because they are attending ICLR for other complementary reasons.
Funding: No, the presenting author of this submission does *not* fall under ICLR’s funding aims, or has sufficient alternate funding.
Anonymization: This submission has been anonymized for double-blind review via the removal of identifying information such as names, affiliations, and identifying URLs.
Submission Number: 3
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