Google Photos Now Has A Foolproof Way To Watermark AI-Edited Images

Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority

Magic Editor on the Pixel 9 series offers a useful AI-powered editing feature that essentially lets you recreate sections of an image using a descriptive prompt. You can use the Reimagine tool to select parts of a photo and either add or subtract elements by describing what you want to see in the final image. It’s an easy way for users to make stellar edits without professional know-how, and the resulting images can look pretty realistic.

Since the tool lets you recreate large parts of an image, Google wants to ensure that others can easily tell that the resulting image is AI-generated. To that end, the company plans to use SynthID to mark images edited using Reimagine in Magic Editor starting this week.

For the unaware, SynthID is a technology from Google’s DeepMind division capable of identifying and watermarking AI-generated content. It embeds digital watermarks into AI-generated images, audio, text, or video, and Google already uses it to watermark images generated with its Imagen text-to-image model. The watermark is imperceptible to the human eye, doesn’t compromise the image quality, can’t be removed by scrubbing the metadata, and remains detectable even after modifications like cropping, adding filters, or changing colors.

Once the change goes live, users will be able to see the SynthID watermark using the “About this image” feature in Search or Chrome. As you can see in the attached image, the feature will show whether a SynthID watermark is present and the image’s metadata.

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