How to use Google's SynthID AI detection website - Engadget

Why it matters

Google has made its SynthID Detector publicly available, letting anyone upload an image, video, or audio file at SynthID.com and receive a yes-or-no answer about whether a SynthID watermark is present. The tool scans for watermarks that Google's Gemini model embeds in its output, and it can also identify media created by partner models from OpenAI, NVIDIA, and Kakao, though support for Apple's content is not yet finished. Because it checks for a specific marker rather than analyzing patterns, it avoids false positives but cannot detect media from models that don't use SynthID, such as Meta's tools, and it doesn't indicate which parts of a file were AI-generated. Google says signatures survive edits, and daily check limits plus a login requirement are meant to discourage efforts to strip watermarks. The piece situates the tool among rival detectors from OpenAI and Meta, noting that no detector reliably catches all generative AI, and that public general-purpose detectors often mislabel human work.