It’s the first Big Tech firm to publicly launch one, after a group of them pledged to develop them at the White House in July.
Google DeepMind has launched a new watermarking tool that labels whether images have been generated with AI.
The tool, called SynthID, will initially be available only to users of Google’s AI image generator Imagen, which is hosted on Google Cloud’s machine learning platform Vertex. Users will be able to generate images using Imagen and then choose whether to add a watermark or not. The hope is that it could help people tell when AI-generated content is being passed off as real, or help protect copyright.
In the past year, the huge popularity of generative AI models has also brought with it the proliferation of AI-generated deepfakes, nonconsensual porn, and copyright infringements. Watermarking—a technique where you hide a signal in a piece of text or an image to identify it as AI-generated—has become one of the most popular ideas proposed to curb such harms.
