Google opens its SynthID AI-content detector to everyone

Google on Tuesday launched a public website that lets anyone verify whether a piece of media — an image, video, or audio clip — was generated using AI. The company had previously made the tool available only to select journalists, media professionals, and researchers for testing at Google I/O last year, and is now opening it up to everyone.

The site accepts a wide range of formats: 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.

The detection relies on SynthID, the invisible watermarking technology Google introduced in 2023. Google’s own generative models and tools — including Nano Banana, Veo, Lyria, Gemini, Flow, ProducerAI, and Vids — already embed SynthID watermarks into any media they produce, which the new site can then read back to confirm AI origin.

Google said OpenAI, Nvidia, and Kakao also support SynthID, and OpenAI maintains its own separate site for checking content. Apple is said to be adding support soon as well. Google has also built SynthID verification directly into the Gemini app and into Google Chrome. The company said people currently make 1 million requests a day to verify content through its tools.

Microsoft and Meta have developed their own separate standards for watermarking and verifying AI-generated content. However, Google acknowledged that none of these detection systems are infallible — they often fail to identify content created by their own makers’ models.

Why it matters

Opening SynthID verification to everyone, instead of just journalists and researchers, positions Google’s watermark as a default check against AI-generated media — though Google itself concedes the detection isn’t foolproof, even against content made by its own models.