Google launches a public SynthID website to detect AI-generated media

Google is putting AI-content detection directly in the hands of ordinary users. According to TechCrunch, the company launched a new website where anyone can upload an image, video, or audio clip to check whether it was generated using AI; the tool had been available only to select journalists, media professionals, and researchers for testing at Google I/O last year, and is now open to all.

The site accepts a broad range of formats. For images it supports JPG, JPEG, PNG, BMP, WEBP, AVIF, HEIC, HEIF, TIFF, TIF, and GIF; for video, MP4, MOV, and WEBM; and for audio, WAV, MP3, OGG, FLAC, AAC, and M4A.

The underlying technology is SynthID, which Google introduced in 2023. Google's Nano Banana, Veo, and Lyria models, as well as generation-capable tools such as Gemini, Flow, ProducerAI, and Vids, all use SynthID to watermark the media they produce.

The ecosystem is widening too. OpenAI, NVIDIA, and Kakao already support SynthID, Apple is said to be adding support soon, and OpenAI maintains its own site for checking content. Google says people currently make about 1 million requests to verify content every day.

Google has also baked SynthID verification into the Gemini app and Chrome, bringing verification closer to where people actually work and browse.

These tools are not infallible, however. TechCrunch notes that Microsoft and Meta keep their own watermarking and verification standards, and that such tools often fail to identify content created by their own makers' models.

With AI-generated media proliferating and harder than ever to tell apart from the real thing, a single public verification entry point is a meaningful step for platform trust.

What to watch next: whether Apple joins SynthID as reported, and whether the competing standards can converge.