Google is adding AI watermarks to photos manipulated by Magic Editor

Google Photos is adding its digital SynthID watermarks to photos that have been edited using the Magic Editor’s generative AI feature. The new feature is rolling out “this week” according to Google, and is intended to make it easier for people to quickly identify images that have been manipulated using the “reimagine” tool in Magic Editor.

SynthID is a watermarking system created by Google’s DeepMind team that embeds a digital metadata tag directly into images, video, audio, and text to identify if they were created or altered using AI tools. The watermark is already being applied to images that are entirely AI-generated using Google’s Imagen text-to-image model. Similar watermarking systems have also been developed by other companies, like the Content Credentials that Adobe applies to works created or edited using its suite of Creative Cloud apps.

That’s a problem the new watermarking update is attempting to solve, but there are a few issues. For one, SynthID doesn’t visibly alter the image it’s attached to and can be identified using a dedicated AI detection tool that’s a part of Google’s “About this image” feature. Google also says that some edits made using the Magic Editor reimagine “may be too small for SynthID to label and detect.”

While watermarking tech can help if it does catch manipulations, some experts in this field agree that watermarking alone won’t be effective enough to reliably authenticate AI-generated content at scale, and will require a varied suite of different approaches working in tandem.