Google’s AI detection website is now available

Google makes SynthID Detector available to everyone, its web tool for identifying content created and edited by AI. The web tool is capable of reporting images, video and audio clips created with AI tools from Google, OpenAI, NVIDIA and Kakao. It is free to use, but requires users to log in with a Google, OpenAI or Apple account.

The website will also be one of the first AI detection tools capable of identifying images created with Apple’s AI features, like Image Playground. Google says support for images created and edited with Apple Intelligence is coming soon.

Google has been working on SynthID Detector for over a year and has already made versions of it available to journalists and other “media professionals”. Now anyone can visit synthid.com to check if a piece of content has a SynthID watermark. The company has other methods for detecting SynthID watermarks and C2PA content credentials, including its “Circle to Search” feature and the Gemini app itself. But creating a website dedicated to detection makes these features a little easier to access, especially for people who don’t yet use Google’s AI tools.

As with all AI detection features, there are some limitations. SynthID Detector cannot detect all AI-generated content because many companies rely on different standards for watermarking. Watermarks can also be removed from content in certain situations. And Google’s website doesn’t distinguish between content created entirely by AI and content simply edited with it. It will therefore not provide specific details on how a particular piece of content was created or what aspects might be synthetic.

Although SynthID Detector is a step in the right direction, verification of AI-generated content is still far from foolproof. AI detection tools like SynthID Detector rely on a patchwork of different standards, so there is no universal checker. Meta, for example, has been experimenting with its own web tool that can identify images created or modified with its latest Muse Image models, but not those of other companies or even its own earlier models.

But it seems likely that Google will get more businesses to sign up for SynthID over time. The company previously said that ElevenLabs was committed to adding support for watermarks. On its website, Google says it is “continuously working to expand our partnerships to help detect more generated media.”