Google Unveils Public SynthID Tool to Detect AI-Generated Media

SynthID Technology and Its Role in AI Media Generation

Google launched a new website on Tuesday that enables anyone to check whether an image, video, or audio clip was created by artificial intelligence. The service builds on SynthID, a watermarking system the company introduced in 2023 to flag AI‑generated content. Google’s own generative models—Nano Banana, Veo, and Lyria—as well as tools such as Gemini, Flow, ProducerAI, and Vids, automatically embed SynthID markers in every piece of media they produce, allowing the system to later verify its origin.

Industry Adoption and Integration of SynthID

Before the public release, the tool was offered to select journalists, media professionals, and researchers for testing at last year’s Google I/O. Now the platform is open to everyone and accepts a broad set of file types: JPG, JPEG, PNG, BMP, WEBP, AVIF, HEIC, HEIF, TIFF, TIF, and GIF for images; MP4, MOV, and WEBM for video; and WAV, MP3, OGG, FLAC, AAC, and M4A for audio. Google has also integrated SynthID verification directly into the Gemini app and Google Chrome, and users are already making roughly one million verification requests each day.

Support for SynthID extends beyond Google. OpenAI, Nvidia, and Kakao have adopted the same watermarking approach, and OpenAI operates its own verification site. Apple is reported to be adding support in the near future. Meanwhile, Microsoft and Meta maintain their own watermarking and verification standards, but those systems are not foolproof and often fail to detect content generated by their own models.