The scale of AI-generated media can be hard to grasp.
Starling Lab, a research collaboration from Stanford University and the University of Southern California, estimates that it took until 1975—149 years after the invention of the camera—for humanity to create 1.5 billion images. It took generative AI just 18 months to do the same. And AI didn’t stop there.
This spring, Google announced at I/O that its tools had been used to create more than 100 billion AI images and videos in just a couple of years, and Google is far from the only source of AI content. The company coupled this staggering statistic with a slew of partnerships to expand the use of its SynthID watermarking technology, which can be used to label AI-generated content and potentially help people identify what’s real.
The company says SynthID is robust enough to survive edits, and we’re about to see that tested as OpenAI, Runway, Nvidia, and others begin using it. Can invisible watermarks solve the AI content conundrum?
An indelible-ish mark #
There are currently two approaches to labeling AI content: invisible watermarks like SynthID and metadata schemas like the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA). Google uses both to label its AI content, but C2PA is not intended to hide in plain sight like a watermark. It’s cryptographically secure, so you can’t fake it, but C2PA is trivially easy to strip out. Simply editing and saving an image or taking a screenshot can remove C2PA.
Watermarks like SynthID are encoded in the pixels of an image or video or in the waveform of an audio clip. Content that gets passed around the Internet degrades from compression, resizing, and edits, but Google says SynthID should still be present even in well-worn memes. Google DeepMind scientist Pushmeet Kohli explained to Ars that the team put a great deal of work into ensuring SynthID was a durable way to label AI content.