I Tested Google’s New AI Image Detector, and It’s Difficult (but Not Impossible) to Trick

An abundance of AI imagery is something we all have to live with these days—from school posters to restaurant menus—and while there are still certain tells that indicate something was made with AI , they're not always present. In a lot of cases, it can be almost impossible to distinguish an AI image from a real one. This is a problem for all kinds of reasons, and, as such, the AI companies are attempting to address it. Images produced by Gemini and ChatGPT come with an invisible watermark called SynthID . That way, AI-generated images don't need visible branding in order to identify their origins. Of course, you need access to a detector to know whether this watermark is present. As it happens, Google just launched a standalone SynthID checker tool on the web, free for anyone to use. I gave "SynthID Detector" a shot, and while it largely works as expected, it isn't perfect. How Google's SynthID Detector works SynthID doesn't promise to always detect AI. Credit: Lifehacker For a while now, Gemini has let you upload an image and ask if it is AI-generated. With the new online portal, it's even easier to check—though you do still need to sign in with your Google account. Once in, you can check a wide variety of files. This checker supports JPG, JPEG, PNG, BMP, WEBP, AVIF, HEIC, HEIF, TIFF, TIF, and GIF image formats; MP4, MOV, and WEBM for videos, and WAV, MP3, OGG, FLAC, AAC, and M4A for audio. As long as a file was made by a SynthID-supporting AI, it should ha…