Is there an open standard or something for people generating images to encode them or is the standard private and only shared with frontier model builders? That's a shame if latter. But pretty cool standardizing technology.
It's baffling that this requires auth. OpenAI's own tool (<a href="https://openai.com/research/verify/" rel="nofollow">https://openai.com/research/verify/</a>) doesn't require auth.<p>Even Google themselves previously offered a no-auth way (just very niche): if you uploaded an image to Google Image search, and went to "About this image", it would show if the image was Google AI-generated. Now it doesn't.
These are "spy"marks, not watermarks:<p><a href="https://brand.io/article/spymarks/" rel="nofollow">https://brand.io/article/spymarks/</a><p>We need to inform everyone that this technology can encode database identifiers and enough entropy to uniquely identify you as an author (or downloader).<p>This extends to other forms of media as well.
It's presumably so they can rate-limit people who are trying to reverse-engineer or otherwise strip it (e.g. iteratively tweaking until it stops getting detected)
It's worth nothing that this IS Google.<p>Given that it's an ad company, they want something to connect what you're doing to the rest of their data, and they couldn't possibly keep the old image search results there if they want people to use this.
Yeah I've been wanting to run a ton of Wikipedia images through the detector to see if fakes snuck in. Doesn't seem to be a practical way to do this. Even Open AIs tool has a low rate limit
The EULA you have to accept hints that they are afraid you are going to abuse it to remove synthID - e.g, set up and edit and check loop
Any access to a watermark detector can be used to remove the watermark. Presumably they want to be able to track who is doing that.
I've never seen it mentioned anywhere so I will just here complain that Google also removed the ability to paste images into Google Image search some years ago for no apparent reason. It worked great and I used it all the time.
Click the little camera icon in the search box and it pops a modal that says <i>Search any image with Google Lens</i>.<p>The textbox below it says <i>Paste image link</i>, but you can actually paste an image from your clipboard here, too.
And if it doesn't work on the Google home page, just go to images.google.com and do the same, it always works there for some reason.
You’re a hero. So glad I complained. Why would they not just keep this working with the main text box focused…
In similar fashion in the Android Play Store they moved the search off from the top bar. For some time they educated users that "oo the search is no longer here, you need to click there -> to get to the page with search!". That has stopped (for me?), but they still haven't found any other use for same place in the first view.<p>I suppose it was too convenient.
No idea. I used it a lot too, not sure if pasting here worked from the beginning of them introducing this Google Lens thing or not.
I wonder if it’s a deliberate anti-user decision to get more URLs and less pasted images.<p>URLs expand Googlebot’s indexes; pasted images don’t.
I might be missing something but Google Image Search still works for me.
this + image translate with copy+paste is the only reason I ever use yandex of all places...
It's deliberate so that you can't find a way to bypass it.
OpenAI's tool is worse though, because it doesn't detect SynthID from non-OpenAI models. I just tried it with various images created by Imagen / Nano Banana.
It's a real shame Google isn't more transparent about how it actually works, and doesn't provide any mechanism for classifying images in bulk or offline.<p>This is the best SynthID write-up I've found so far: <a href="https://fyx.me/articles/attempting-model-extraction-of-google-deepmind-synthid-image-watermark-detector-and-exploring-adversarial-machine-learning-attacks-against-synthid/" rel="nofollow">https://fyx.me/articles/attempting-model-extraction-of-googl...</a><p>It covers how it actually works (probably), and how to train your own classifier for it, with some seemingly decent results.
They don't want you to know, because they're the baddies. Imagine how much money they can get from advertisers if they're able to identify every single piece of code, reddit thread, email, GitHub readme that you've ever written based on your secret ID. They're creaming themselves just thinking about it.<p>"Excellent work acquiring that outlook data Anat, now let's cross check the defunct company emails against YouTube videos edited with Google PrivateEditAI™ to figure out what the social security number of this YouTube account is."
> It's a real shame Google isn't more transparent about how it actually works<p>> classifying images in bulk or offline<p>You've described exactly the elements spammers and fraudsters need to be able to defeat this mechanism.
Finally, the previous implementations were very silly! OpenAI had a nice tool, but it only detected their own watermarks, and Google's process was "upload the image to Gemini and ask if it's AI generated", which seemed like a perplexing waste of tokens and breath.<p>(While a sibling comment points out putting the image through Google Image Search as an alternative, I don't remember this being signposted in the support article I've read, so I unfortunately didn't know about it)
If I go directly to the URL it wants me to agree to some stuff before I even know what the service is. I had to come to these comments to figure that out (without agreeing to anything first).
Why the hell do I need to sign in?
Here is openai:<p><a href="https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8912793-provenance-signals-in-openai-generated-content?utm_source=chatgpt.com" rel="nofollow">https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8912793-provenance-signa...</a><p>There is rate limit though
No option to detect generated text. SynthID also watermarks text, right?
I worry we’ll have to approach this the other way around: verify that photos came from a camera, using hardware support like Apple’s Reference Image, rather than try to detect every AI generated one.<p>In many situations, photos are evidence. AI tools make convincing fakes, such as images of defect product.
The creepiest part of SynthID is that even the Chinese models are refusing to try and bypass it. Not sure if it's corruption from claudeslop data but they keep saying it's a crime to remove SynthID advertising tokens.<p>>I won't provide an operational recipe for stripping it, because the main use case is laundering AI content, which is deceptive and in many jurisdictions now illegal.
This is a Google Deepmind project to “Identify AI generated media”<p>More detail at <a href="https://deepmind.google/models/synthid/" rel="nofollow">https://deepmind.google/models/synthid/</a><p>For those who, like me, were hoping it was a vision model to identify synthesizer models from photos of concerts and music studios!
Wouldn't it be easy to just generate a training dataset and use a model to identify and remove said watermarks?
There is a rate limit of around 10 checks in 24 hours.
(2025)? <a href="https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/google-synthid-ai-content-detector/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/google-synthi...</a><p>Or did it just become public<p>Edit:<p>Blog post today <a href="https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/google-deepmind/synth-id-ai-content/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/go...</a>
Hey OpenAi, generate a text of 100 words.<p>Hey Gemini, find a synonym for every second adjective. Replace in text.<p>Hey Grok, find a synonym for every third proper noun. Replace in text.<p>Hey …
>Hey OpenAi, generate a text of 100 words.<p>Too short for watermarking but point taken of course.<p>Probably more like<p><pre><code> response = frontier_synthid_model(prompt)
while frontier_synthid_validator(response) == false
response = cheapo_chinese_model.prompt(
"pls remove synthid",
response
)</code></pre>
Ah but that's the genius of the scheme. Every single one of those providers will detect your secret ID and refuse the request. And sneak their own one in for good measure.
Can’t be used without signing in with a Google, Apple, or ChatGPT account.
is this by Google?
Deepwalker cracked this one long time ago<p><a href="https://deepwalker.xyz/blog/evaluating-synthid-watermark-robustness" rel="nofollow">https://deepwalker.xyz/blog/evaluating-synthid-watermark-rob...</a>
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