Google, in a bid to make the AI environment safer, has added SynthID in Google Photos that will mark images edited with generative AI using Reimagine in Magic Editor with an invisible digital watermark. This will help identify whether an image has been edited using Google’s AI-based offerings within Google Photos. The announcement regarding the same was made in October last year.
SynthID is a technology that embeds an imperceptible, digital watermark directly into AI-generated images, audio, text or video. The technology was unveiled in 2023. “SynthID isn’t a silver bullet for identifying AI generated content, but is an important building block for developing more reliable AI identification tools and can help millions of people make informed decisions about how they interact with AI-generated content,” said Google in a blog post last year.
In May 2024, Google began using SynthID for watermarking AI-generated text in the Gemini app and web experience, and video in Veo. With SynthID in Google Photos, you can use the “About this image” menu which shows if a SynthID watermark is present as well as an image’s metadata.
“You may have already seen SynthID used to watermark images created entirely by AI — like those made by Google’s text-to-image model, Imagen. This helps people identify AI-generated content quickly and easily,” said the company.
However, Google notes that in some cases, “edits made using Reimagine may be too small for SynthID to label and detect — like if you change the color of a small flower in the background of an image.”
In other AI news related to Google, it recently announced the release of Gemini 2.0 Pro and 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental models in the Gemini App as well as on the web. Google’s Gemini 2.0 Pro Experimental is being touted as the brand’s “best model yet for coding performance and complex prompts.” Google says it has the strongest coding performance and ability to handle complex prompts, with better understanding and reasoning of world knowledge, than any model it has released so far.