If you look at a photo today, you likely won’t know, at first glance, whether it’s real or fake. Or whether it has been digitally altered in some way. Thankfully, companies involved with developing AI technologies aren’t ignoring this problem…
“Reimagined” Google Photos Will Have SynthID Attached
From now on, any images edited using the Reimagine feature in Google Photos’ Magic Editor will be watermarked using SynthID. While the watermark will not be visible to the naked eye, systems that need to know whether an image has been created or altered using AI will be able to detect it.
According to Google itself in a post on The Keyword, SynthID “embeds an imperceptible, digital watermark directly into AI-generated images, audio, text or video.” It has already been used to watermark images created entirely by AI, like those made by Imagen, but it’s now being added to images merely edited by AI.
The Reimagine feature is part of Magic Editor, but only on Pixel 9 or later (including the Pixel Fold and Pixel Tablet). As you can see in the thread of images embedded below, Reimagine uses AI to add, remove, or change elements within a photo.
Google was keen to point out a slight flaw in its plans though. Which is that some edits made using Reimagine may be too small for SynthID to detect, meaning that no watermark will be added. However, if an edit is that small as to not be noticeable by SynthID, ultimately, it should be too small for us humans to worry about.
We All Need to Know What’s Real and What’s Not Real
With multiple companies refining AI technologies, it’s getting more and more difficult to determine what’s real and what’s fake. This goes for photos, videos, and even audio, all of which can be augmented or replicated by artificial intelligence.
This inability to determine what’s real and what’s fake clearly needs combating. So it’s good to see Google tackling this issue head on. And while some people may prefer a visible watermark, embedding a digital watermark seems like a good compromise.
While the watermark will not be visible to the naked eye, you’ll be able to see if an image has been digitally manipulated by artificial intelligence using Google’s About this image tool. This will inform you whether a SynthID watermark is present, as well as reveal the image’s metadata.
