As AI-generated images become more common, Google DeepMind and Google Cloud have launched a tool to watermark such images.

SynthID is a tool that adds an imperceptible watermark to images created by Google’s Imagen. The company discussed the tool in a blog post:

Today, in partnership with Google Cloud, we’re launching a beta version of SynthID, a tool for watermarking and identifying AI-generated images. This technology embeds a digital watermark directly into the pixels of an image, making it imperceptible to the human eye, but detectable for identification.

SynthID is being released to a limited number of Vertex AI customers using Imagen, one of our latest text-to-image models that uses input text to create photorealistic images.

While SynthID is currently designed to work with Google’s tools, the company says it could integrate with third-party services in the future:

SynthID could be expanded for use across other AI models and we’re excited about the potential of integrating it into more Google products and making it available to third parties in the near future — empowering people and organisations to responsibly work with AI-generated content.

Tools like SynthID are an important step toward ensuring responsible use of AI.