Google’s new SynthID Detector can help spot AI slop
- May 20
- 2 min read
Google is launching a way to quickly check whether an image, video, audio file, or snippet of text was created using one of its AI tools.
SynthID Detector, announced Tuesday at Google I/O 2025, is a verification portal that uses Google’s SynthID watermarking technology to help identify AI-generated content. Users can upload a file, and SynthID Detector will determine whether the whole sample — or just a part of it — is AI-created.
The debut of SynthID Detector comes as AI-generated media floods the web. The number of deepfake videos alone skyrocketed 550% from 2019 to 2024, according to one estimate. Per The Times, of the top 20 most-viewed posts on Facebook in the U.S. last fall, four were “obviously created by AI.”
Of course, SynthID Detector has its limitations. It only detects media created with tools that use Google’s SynthID specification — mainly Google products. Microsoft has its own content watermarking technologies, as do Meta and OpenAI.
SynthID also isn’t a perfect technology. Google admits that it can becircumvented, particularly in the case of text.
To that first point, Google is arguing that its SynthID standard is already used at a massive scale. According to the tech giant, more than 10 billion pieces of media have been watermarked with SynthID since it launched in 2023.
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