Alphabet Inc.'s (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) Google DeepMind team has developed a new SynthID technology that makes it nearly impossible for people to remove watermarks from AI-generated images.
What Happened: Google's DeepMind team, which works on futuristic and cutting-edge technologies, has developed a new solution for people editing out watermarks from AI-generated images.
One direct consequence of this is that it should help Google spot fake news wherein people try to associate AI-generated images with real or alleged incidents.
The rise of AI has made it easier for various professionals to get much work done. This has also made photo editing easier, allowing users to generate or edit images using prompts easily. This also opens the doors to misuse as it is not easy to identify if an image has been generated using AI as these images have become increasingly realistic.
Today, DeepMind and Google Cloud have announced a beta for SynthID, a tool enabling users to watermark and identify AI-generated images.
SynthID will embed a digital watermark to make identifying an AI-generated image easy for AI-powered detection tools. This watermark will not be visible to the human eye, so the issue of cropping out watermarks doesn't even matter.
"This technology embeds a digital watermark directly into the pixels of an image, making it imperceptible to the human eye, but detectable for identification," Google DeepMind said.
Here's How It Works: Describing the process, DeepMind says that SynthID uses deep learning models that have been trained on a diverse set of images.
The research team has also accounted for users using filters or changing colors - SynthID's technology allows the watermark to remain detectable even after editing the image.
The best aspect of this technology is that it integrates the watermark with the original content of the image. The end result is a solution that doesn't alter the subject of the images whilst making the watermark detectable by machines.
With a rising risk of AI-generated images and deepfakes being used to spread fake news, SynthID could prove to be a crucial tool in the fightback.