THE CRUNCH
Google has launched SynthID.com, a dedicated website where anyone can check whether an image, video or audio clip carries a SynthID watermark, the invisible signal the company embeds in AI-generated media. Until now, people outside Google's trusted tester programme could only check for the watermark by asking Gemini, which was clunky and could give confusing answers when a simple yes or no was wanted.
The site also closes a significant gap. Google's earlier detector only recognised its own version of SynthID, so AI content from other companies went unflagged even when it carried the watermark. ChatGPT-generated images, for example, do use SynthID but would not have been detected. The detector now supports watermarks from all of Google's partners, and several major AI players have adopted the standard.
The scale is considerable. Google says Gemini alone has integrated SynthID into more than 180 billion images and videos, plus 240,000 years of audio. The watermark itself is an invisible signal encoded in the pixels of images and video and in the waveform of audio, designed to make AI content hard to pass off as authentic.