Real or AI? Google opens its SynthID detector to everyone

Google is opening its SynthID detector to the general public. Since 7 October, anyone worldwide – in English for now – can check whether an image, video or audio file was created with AI from Google or one of its partners. Until now, an early version was available only to media professionals. The move was announced by Pushmeet Kohli, vice president of science and strategic initiatives at Google DeepMind.

Since 2023, SynthID has given AI content an invisible watermark embedded in the image, video or audio itself. According to Google, more than 180 billion images and videos and 240,000 years' worth of audio have been marked so far. The detector also recognises watermarks from partners such as OpenAI, Nvidia and Kakao, with Apple to follow soon. The checks already built into Search, the Gemini app and Chrome regularly handle more than one million requests a day, Google says.

One limit remains: the detector only finds content that carries a SynthID watermark. It cannot flag AI material from systems that do not use the technology, so a negative result is no proof that content was made by a human.