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SynthID: A tool to watermark and identify content generated through AI

79 points by tosh

by parliament32

1 subcomments

Note that watermarking (yes, including text) is a requirement[1] of the EU AI Act, and goes into effect in August 2026, so I suspect we'll see a lot more work in this space in the near future.
[1] Specifically, "...synthetic audio, image, video or text content, shall ensure that the outputs of the AI system are marked in a machine-readable format and detectable as artificially generated or manipulated", see https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/50/

by gregorkas

6 subcomments

I genuinely feel that in this AI world we need the inverse. That every analogue or digital photo taken by traditional means of photography will need to be signed by a certificate, so anyone can verify its authenticity.

by omgmo

0 subcomment

What about spoofing a SynthID false positive for a real image or video? Who can arbitrate what is true?
I think that AI service providers should have safeguards and encoded attribution. This solution helps when people lazily share things with friends or on social media I suppose, rather than stopping motivated bad actors.
The only way to actually implement this I think would be to ban all local models, and to have the service providers store perceptual hashes all generated images and video. It feels like the cat's out of the bag already though (for images at least).

by squigz

0 subcomment

Looks like there's a lot more info here, at least about the text version.
https://ai.google.dev/responsible/docs/safeguards/synthid

by gigel82

0 subcomment

Reposting a comment I made on an earlier thread on this.
We need to be super careful with how legislation around this is passed and implemented. As it currently stands, I can totally see this as a backdoor to surveillance and government overreach.
If social media platforms are required by law to categorize content as AI generated, this means they need to check with the public "AI generation" providers. And since there is no agreed upon (public) standard for imperceptible watermarks hashing that means the content (image, video, audio) in its entirety needs to be uploaded to the various providers to check if it's AI generated.
Yes, it sounds crazy, but that's the plan; imagine every image you post on Facebook/X/Reddit/Whatsapp/whatever gets uploaded to Google / Microsoft / OpenAI / UnnamedGovernmentEntity / etc. to "check if it's AI". That's what the current law in Korea and the upcoming laws in California and EU (for August 2026) require :(

by Aldipower

0 subcomment

As a synthesizer collector with serious GAS I find this particular name very offensive.

by dang

0 subcomment

Related:
Remove/Bypass Google's SynthID AI Watermark - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46692023 - Jan 2026 (1 comment)
SynthID – A tool to watermark and identify content generated through AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071677 - Aug 2025 (83 comments)
SynthID Detector – a new portal to help identify AI-generated content - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44045946 - May 2025 (1 comment)

by manbash

1 subcomments

It's nice that they explain the "what" (...it is doing) but not the "why". Who is going to use it and for what reasons?
Also, if it's essentially a sort of metadata, can't the output generated image be replicated (e.g. screenshot) and thus stripped of any such data?

by throwaway13337

3 subcomments

These sorts of tools will only be able to positively identify a subset of genAI content. But I suspect that people will use it to 'prove' something is not genAI.
In a sense, the identifier company can be an arbiter of the truth. Powerful.
Training people on a half-solution like this might do more harm than good.

by kingstnap

0 subcomment

It's security through obscurity. I'm sure with the technical details or even just sufficient access to a predictive oracle you could break this.
But I suppose it ads friction so better than nothing.
Watermarking text without affecting it is an interesting seemingly weird idea. Does it work any better than (with knowledge of the model used to produce said text), just observing the perplexity is low because its "on policy" generated text.

by u1hcw9nx

3 subcomments

This technology could be used to copyrights as well.
>The watermark doesn’t change the image or video quality. It’s added the moment content is created, and designed to stand up to modifications like cropping, adding filters, changing frame rates, or lossy compression.
But does it survive if you use another generative image model to replicate the image?

by mediumsmart

0 subcomment

Excellent. Everything without the wartmark is real then. Too easy.

by ks2048

0 subcomment

How about a database of verified non-AI images?
I'm thinking of historical images, where there aren't a huge number of existing images and no more will ever be created.
If I see something labeled "Street scene in Paris, 1905". I want to know if it is legit.

by PaulHoule

1 subcomments

   ...But it can be hard to tell the difference between content that’s been 
   AI-generated, and content created without AI.

Pro-Tip: Something like that Sherbet colored dog is always AI generated

by galleywest200

0 subcomment

This is great, but there is no way for me to verify if groups or nation states can pay for a special contract where they do not have to have their outputs watermarked.

0 subcomment

by zelias

0 subcomment

Seems like this really just validates whether a piece of AI content was generated by Google, not AI generated in general
What incentive do open models have to adopt this?

0 subcomment

by geor9e

0 subcomment

This is from 2025. Did something new happen? What am I missing here?

by ChrisArchitect

0 subcomment

something new here OP?
Some previous discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071677

by ekjhgkejhgk

0 subcomment

Is there a paper for this?

by jamiecode

4 subcomments

[dead]

by andrewmcwatters

2 subcomments

I wonder how it stands up to feature analysis.
"Generate a pure white image." "Generate a pure black image." Channel diff, extract steganographic signature for analysis.