Google's SynthID AI watermarking tech is being adopted by OpenAI, Nvidia, and more

"Google’s answer is SynthID, which it first demonstrated three years ago. The company says SynthID has since been used to label 100 billion images and videos, plus 60,000 years' worth of audio. Those numbers are only going up now that SynthID is expanding beyond Google."

"It's also committed to the C2PA standard, which tags content with metadata describing how it was created. Google began using C2PA more prominently with its Pixel 10 smartphones. Photos taken with the Pixel 10 include metadata describing how they were processed. If a highly zoomed image includes generative elements, it gets an AI tag, too."

"Google now says this same feature is coming to videos recorded on Pixel 8, 9, and 10 phones in an update in the coming weeks. It's also adding C2PA scanning to Gemini, allowing the chatbot to explain a file's providence based on the content labeling. This same capability will come to Chrome and Search in a few months."

"On the other hand, SynthID is deeply integrated with AI-generated content. The digital watermark is present in the pixels of images and videos and in the waveform of AI songs and audio overviews from products like NotebookLM. According to Google DeepMind scientist Pushmeet Kohli, the team worked hard to ensure SynthID is much harder to remove, even if you compress it, crop it, or rotate it."

AI-generated images and videos now appear highly realistic, making it harder to distinguish real content. Google’s SynthID labels AI-created media by embedding a digital watermark directly into image and video pixels and into audio waveforms. SynthID has been used at very large scale for labeling images, videos, and audio, and it is expanding beyond Google. Google also uses the C2PA standard to attach metadata describing how content was created, including processing details and AI-generated elements detected in photos. C2PA scanning is planned across Pixel phones, Gemini, Chrome, and Search, enabling provenance explanations based on content labeling. SynthID is designed to remain difficult to remove even after transformations like compression, cropping, or rotation.

Read at Ars Technica