Google’s new SynthID website can identify AI-generated media

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Google on Tuesday launched a new site that lets anyone verify whether a piece of media, be it an image, a video or an audio clip, is generated using AI.

The company had made this tool available to select journalists, media professionals and researchers for testing at Google I/O last year, and is now opening up access to the tool to everyone.

The site supports JPG, JPEG, PNG, BMP, WEBP, AVIF, HEIC, HEIF, TIFF, TIF, and GIF formats for images; MP4, MOV, and WEBM for videos; and WAV, MP3, OGG, FLAC, AAC, and M4A for audio.

Google is using SynthID, which it introduced in 2023, to identify whether media is AI-generated. The company’s Nano Banana, Veo and Lyria models, as well as tools with generation capabilities, like Gemini, Flow, ProducerAI and Vids, all use SynthID to watermark any media they generate.

OpenAI, NVIDIA and Kakao also support SynthID, and OpenAI maintains its own site for checking content. Apple is said to be adding support soon, too.

Google has baked SynthID verification into the Gemini app and Google Chrome. The company said people currently make 1 million requests to verify content every day.

Microsoft and Meta have their own standards for watermarking and verifying content. However, these tools are not infallible, often failing to identify content created by their makers’ models.