It might become a bit harder for the big AI companies to claim they're legitimate, trustworthy companies if there's evidence they're actively trying to get around what it effectively a form of DRM on images, though. They wouldn't just be scraping copyrighted works from the internet, they'd be designing their AIs to work around protections put on those images.

So it wouldn't stop bad actors, the same way that copyright protections and DRM in other forms of media don't stop piracy, but when a big company is doing it, they lose all the "we're not evil" credibility they're trying to create in the media right now.

This won't even work for a week, as when you manipulate a picture with AI it is completely irrelevant to the AI what is in the picture. The AI generates a completely new image and copies a region of the old image over, like good old Photoshop. All the AI need is a bit of guidance so the new image and the original line up, but that's easy to produce, can be done by numerous methods or even manually in seconds if absolutely necessary.

Didn't even notice that anything was different when manipulating the example from the article and it took me a whole 5sec.

If you want to stop manipulations, we already have tools for that: Just put a cryptographic signature on all the stuff you publish. That won't stop manipulations, but it makes it very easy to see that an image was manipulated. That said, the tools have been around for 25 years and never gained any traction, people just don't care that much.

Or, just keep synthesizing the images from scratch and compositing them.

There's another tool called Glaze that does this for artwork, and what that one does is selectively edits individual pixels in a way that makes the artwork look normal to a human, but is rendered as a distorted mess by AIs. Because it's pixels within the image being edited, not the metadata, a screenshot preserves the edits. I think it's also resistant to blending and smoothing tools, because what the AI reads is different to what the human eye sees, and blending and smoothing tools are designed with a human eye in mind.