When you use the Reimagine feature in the Google Photos app, your AI-edited photos will have an invisible watermark made using SynthID technology.
Google has announced that Google Photos will start using SynthID, a technology that embeds imperceptible (to humans) digital watermarks into images, to mark images edited with Reimagine.
Reimagine is part of Magic Editor, and it's a feature that uses generative AI to change the appearance, material, or texture of a part of an image. You enter a text prompt, and Google's AI 'reimagines' the image. This feature is available on the Pixel 9 series.
When Google first released the Reimagine feature, The Verge pointed out it was easy for them to create disturbing imagery with it. While Reimagine isn't the only AI image editing tool that allowed for creating disturbing imagery, it's one of the most accessible, making its lack of safeguards problematic.
Thankfully, Google is pushing out an update to the feature that addresses this problem. Images edited with Reimagine will now have SynthID watermarks embedded in them.
You can verify that the SynthID watermark is present in an image by tapping the "about this image" tab in Google Search when searching an image through Circle to Search or Google Lens.
These new safeguards will help users detect if an image was made using Reimagine, though users need to know how to check that that's the case in the first place.
