this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2026
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You can't reproduce an approximation from any type of hash, so that argument is dead in the water.
Do you understand what I mean by stenographically embedded?
https://www.pseudodna.eu/. Scroll down to "Hash reversal" where they demonstrate the technique.
I took it to be an imperfect attempt to describe more broadly the way that data is mathematically encoded into LLMs.
Technically, stenography would require that the original be retrievable, since stenographic embedding is the process of concealing one thing inside another. Stenos, from the Greek "covered". Personally, I'd argue that to conceal, you have to be able to reveal. If I throw a photograph into a fire I haven't hidden the image in the fire. Modern stenographic image embedding techniques use methods of encoding data into another dataset without visibly altering the second set, with the intent being that that data can later be retrieved by someone who knows that it's there (eg, least significant bit, where you change only the "1" bit of each pixel. This imperceptibly shifts the colour values of the image to a human viewer, but allows you to read out that stored data at a later time).
Now, since your argument rests on the exact opposite, that the data is not retrievable, I simply accepted the term as a "close enough" approximation for what I believe we're both talking about - the extremely complex multidimensional data arrangement that forms the core of an LLM - and carried on from there because I find that sometimes it's better to just roll with a person's choice of language rather than quibble over it.
But since you clearly feel that your meaning was either improperly expressed, or improperly understood, you're welcome to elaborate.
Wow they fucked that up so badly.
My understanding of hashing is a math function that reduces information.
The models and apparently that piece of software have retrievable information, so using that software to generate these images should count as reproduction under existing law.
Close, but not quite. A hash is better understood as a "fingerprint" for a given piece of data. Any given input will produce the same length of output, so it doesn't really "reduce" information - a hash of "Hello world" would actually be significantly longer - but rather it identifies a matching piece of data.
This has a number of uses. For example,if you have a password system on a website, you don't store a user's actual password. That would be terrible for security. Instead you store the hash (yes, salted, for that one pedant who was about to interject). Then when the user enters their password to log in, you hash the entered password and compare it to the stored hash. If they match, you know they're the same string. You can also create a hash of a file and provide that along with the file itself. If the receiver also hashes the file, they can then compare their hash to yours; if they don't match, the file is corrupt or has been tampered with. You'll often see this referred to as a checksum.
Technically, the reproducible data from a hash should be zero, so they don't so much contain information as verify it. But as we've seen from that research, there are ways around that (not the only ones, to be sure). But the idea in theory is that you produce a hash through a one-directional algorithm; very easy to compute A from B, but very, very hard to compute B from A.
It should be noted that this is very different from stenography, which is a variety of systems for storing data, not fingerprinting it. Hashing is also distinct from encryption as a means of securing data, because encryption is intended to be reversible, hashing is not.
I've seen and used fixed length output on hashes, I assumed that is more common than variable length output.
I would not trust variable length output, and it looks like they screwed up their math enough that the function is reversible.