The train of thought that leads to that belief is usually along the lines of: We’re the only sample we have. It’s more likely than not that what our planet and ecosystem has produced is not an outlier but the norm.

That being said, of course I strongly believe those to be fake and also assume that there is a huge amount of variance in what intelligent life with potential to develop spacefaring technology could look like. Therefore we’re probably not an outlier, but the possibilities within non-outliers are still so vast that our first contact would likely look a lot different.

Angela Merkel is a famous example of someone who has a doctorate in quantum chemistry and was a researcher before turning to politics.

I don’t think that:

The tool embeds a digital “watermark” directly into the image that can’t be seen by the human eye but can be picked up by a computer that’s been trained to read it.

Is gonna be helpful for keeping AI generated images out of training sets. It would require the people who make the model to actually implement that tool into their model.

I don’t think most researchers not affiliated with google will chose to do that.