Google will soon tell if a video or text has been generated using AI, here’s how

With use of generative AI increasing by the minute, there is a lot of AI-powered content out there. Sometimes it becomes really hard — more so in the case of text — to differentiate whether the content has been created purely by humans or it has been generated using AI. Google plans to change that with something called SynthID.

At the I/O developer conference, Google SynthID will now be expanded to text, video and images. SynthID was announced by Google last year but the wider roll out will happen soon.

All large language models (LLMs) use tokens which are kind of building blocks for processing information. These tokens can be a single character, word or part of a phrase. Each possible token is assigned a score, which is the percentage chance of it being the right one. Tokens with higher scores are more likely to be used. LLMs repeat these steps to build a coherent response, explained Google.

SynthID is designed to embed imperceptible watermarks directly into the text generation process. Google says that SynthID “isn’t a silver bullet for identifying AI generated content, but is an important building block for developing more reliable AI identification tools and can help millions of people make informed decisions about how they interact with AI-generated content.”