While we are experiencing a revolution in the development of artificial intelligence capable of assisting us in various tasks, they also bring along several issues. Apart from moral dilemmas or labor conflicts due to job displacement, the increasing use of AIs is fueling the spread of misinformation.
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In the case of chatbots (text-based AI) like ChatGPT or the new Bing, we have discussed more than once how much they enjoy inventing information and lying blatantly. As you can imagine, there have been cases where false information provided by AI has caused various legal issues.
Turning to image-generating AIs, the problem is similar. A few months ago, viral images of Donald Trump supposedly being arrested by the police circulated on the internet, which turned out to be fake (though somewhat prescient given the recent events involving the former US president), and they were created using the AI Midjourney.
In order to mitigate the spread of images created by artificial intelligence, including the infamous “deepfakes,” Google has announced SynthID this week, a new tool that would embed a sort of digital watermark directly into the image. Although humans wouldn’t be able to see it, a trained program could detect it.
With this tool, Google aims to create a system where the majority of images generated by AI can be easily identified through embedded watermarks, as explained by Pushmeet Kohli, Vice President of Research at Google DeepMind. The executive also warns that this new tool is not entirely foolproof. Not yet.
The uniqueness of SynthID is that, unlike other watermark systems like the one included in DALL-E, it works even after the image has been significantly altered. Therefore, if someone modifies an AI-generated image that has a SynthID watermark, it will persist even if the image is flipped or subjected to a color filter.
Currently, SynthID is only available for select paying customers of Google, and it only works if the images are created using “Imagen,” Google’s image generation tool. SynthID is still in the experimental phase, so its use is not mandatory for its clients.
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