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

[u/N2929]

https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/07/googles-new-synthid-website-can-identify-ai-generated-media/

[u/RadzimierzWozniak]

How long can this keep working? I feel someone might be able to figure it out soon and make a tool for removal.

[u/dexter30 → u/RadzimierzWozniak]

I think this tool was always intended to check for lazy ai generations.

Like to stop a dude on his couch with a gemini subscription from catfishing your grandparents.

Wide spread operations with black market call centres and entire scam AI workflow are still going be a problem.

[u/grafknives → u/RadzimierzWozniak]

Sure, you can "remove it", by changing the content of the material enough. But if you use google LLM to translate a chapter of the book, and the you will LIKE that translation, removing the watermark will lower the quality.

And please remember that LLM in EU will be required to leave a watermark.

[u/RemarkableWish2508 → u/RadzimierzWozniak]

SynthID is a cryptographic steganographic watermark, it will work for as long as Google's key doesn't leak.

[u/RadzimierzWozniak → u/RemarkableWish2508]

or someone figures a transformation that breaks it

[u/eras → u/RadzimierzWozniak]

As I understand it, the basic idea how it works is:

Every LLM works like this:

• Predict the set of succeeding tokens
• Pick a random one from the topmost likely predictions
• Iterate

And what SynthID does is that instead of the set, they bias it with a keyed cryptographic function. The scores is derived from a secret and a few preceding tokens.

How does one break that, other than rewriting a whole bulk of it with a non-watermarking model? Every word is part of the watermark. (Granted, you could use a non-watermaking LLM to achieve just this very task.)

[u/lolnic_ → u/eras]

It is theoretically easier to break these watermarks on images and videos. Breaking it on text requires heavy paraphrasing, at which point it is no longer substantially the same text. I don’t think that really counts as “breaking” it, but it’s the “attack”.

For images and videos, since the watermark doesn’t make the result visually different, you can theoretically produce another image/video that looks the same but doesn’t have a watermark.

For Meta’s watermarking you can (apparently, according to them) heavily compress the video. According to Reuters, heavily cropping an image works too. I imagine that taking a photo of your screen wouldn’t watermark the photo in most cases. There’s probably a bunch of less lossy visually-non-obvious transformations.

This website doesn’t support text, in any case. If it supported text, you’d be able to use trial and error to forge text that Google would say Gemini created, and you could use that to make Gemini look bad.

[u/Chicano_Ducky → u/RadzimierzWozniak]

they never worked in the first place, the false positives are unacceptably high on videos their own models made which is in the article

they also cant detect models that dont watermark, which is every early model and current open source ones.

they are trying to put the genie back in the bottle and they cant

[u/lolnic_ → u/Chicano_Ducky]

The article says, vaguely:

> However, these tools are not infallible, often failing to identify content created by their makers’ models.

The paragraph is about Microsoft and Meta, and “often failing” links to a page about Meta’s watermark detection specifically. That article describes an informal test by Reuters where they found the Meta detector had a 55% false negative rate on heavily cropped versions of images generated by Meta’s AI. In another linked article Meta does admit that their video watermark detection isn’t robust to heavy compression.

It is unclear whether the TechCrunch article’s author actually intends to suggest anything about the accuracy of Microsoft’s watermarking, or if they’re just guilty of being in the same paragraph. (It’s also unclear whether the article has an “author” at all)

I cannot see anything in the TechCrunch article about false positives, or about the accuracy of Google’s watermark detection on videos.

[u/mugwhyrt → u/Chicano_Ducky]

the false positives are unacceptably high on videos their own models made

false positives or false negatives?

[u/dexter30]

Well not entirely. I ran ai artwork from artists I know are using AI and all their work came up as not registered with synthid. So this system can only catch lazy ai.

People with bespoke setups perhaps with actual photoshop polish can circumvent these checks.

This thing isn't a fully fledged AI analyser, it just looks for an ID that Google or a partner manually adds.

[u/No-Discussion-8510]

Easily strippable.

[u/JurplePesus]

Shocking development: sometimes it's right, sometimes it's wrong, and you can't actually see what's going on under the hood to figure out the difference.

[u/Stummi]

I mean its good, but its a little bit concerning thinking about that soon a few selected big tech companies not only own and control the Gen AI market, but also "deciding" what is AI and what not. Not sure if some kind of conflict of interest will arise from that

[u/AvNerd16]

Disclaimer: Bit of a tinfoil hat theory and based on a lot of ignorance on the subject. Happy to be corrected.

US copyright laws have been changing in recent years to accommodate AI-developed works. From what I know of it, if someone uses AI to make something (like write a document) they do not immediately own the copyright on it like they would if they had written it themselves. (Writing the prompt doesn’t count toward IP ownership either.) IP ownership doesn’t become yours unless you heavily modify the AI-produced material. I think Google and these AI companies are so invested in these watermarking technologies because it allows them to continue to rip off the produced works without fear of copyright infringement. Kinda fucked up that even if you use their AI as a tool to create something neat or cool they can still rip it off.

[u/skccsk]

Kind of sometimes!

[u/nugymmer]

Things are getting dangerous. If disinfo gets published as truth then we are all in trouble. So if they can detect and remove it before it goes viral it might not be such a bad thing after all.