Google Makes its SynthID AI Content Detector Available to Everyone

After introducing the SynthID technology for watermarking AI-generated content that’s been spreading across the Internet, Google is making its new SynthID Detector available to everyone. The AI content detector was first made available to media professionals last year, but everyone can now access it to identify AI-generated media.

“With this new SynthID Detector, anyone can easily check if an image, video, or audio file was made with AI from Google or our partners, including OpenAI, NVIDIA, Kakao, and soon, Apple. This tool joins our built-in verification features in Search, the Gemini app, and Chrome, which now regularly handle over 1 million requests daily,” said Pushmeet Kohli VP, Science and Strategic Initiatives, Google DeepMind.

While Google deserves credit for helping everyone to identify AI-generated content, this can only work if the companies working on generative AI apps embrace Google’s SynthID watermarks. Because yes, this SynthID Detector can only detect AI content from companies already using the technology.

SynthID works by putting invisible watermarks across images, video, and audio content. For text content, there are other AI detectors like Pangram that analyze language patterns used by generative AI models. However, this isn’t as effective as an intentional watermark like SynthID.

In the EU, OpenAI announced this week that it will start watermarking text generated by ChatGPT by leaving patterns that AI detectors can catch. Anthropic also started using a similar technology in text generated by Claude, but unlike OpenAI, the company is doing so worldwide.

While it’s probably going to take a while to see an industry-wide standard for AI-generated content emerge, Google said that it’s “continuously working on extending our partnerships to allow detecting more generated media.” So far, the company said that it has watermarked over 180 billion images and videos and 240,000 years of audio content with SynthID.