Google makes its watermarking tool for text generated by AI open-source

Developed by Google Deepmind, the algorithm subtly changes the AI generation to make it detectable.

Google’s technology to watermark text generated by artificial intelligence (AI) is now accessible to all.

SynthID is a tool developed by Google Deepmind, the firm’s laboratory dedicated to AI and it just became open-source.

It works by introducing slight modifications to the generated text “introducing a statistical signature into the generated text,” according to an article published in Nature.

These signatures “are imperceptible to humans” Google noted in a post on the Big Tech giant’s blog dedicated to developers.

The watermarking process doesn’t slow down the generation and doesn’t need to access the large language model (LLM), “which is often proprietary,” Nature’s article noted.

“Now, other [generative] AI developers will be able to use this technology to help them detect whether text outputs have come from their own [LLMs], making it easier for more developers to build AI responsibly,” Pushmeet Kohli, the vice president of research at Google DeepMind, told the MIT Technology Review.

The company ran a test of its watermarking tool through its chatbot Gemini. They analysed approximately 20 million watermarked and unwatermarked responses from the chat and noted no statistically significant difference in the feedback regarding their quality.

The algorithm is currently deployed on Gemini and Gemini Advanced because “there is concern that it could contribute to misinformation and misattribution problems,” the blog post noted.

“Watermarking is one technique for mitigating these potential impacts”.

According to the researchers, it provides “superior detectability compared with existing methods,” like analysing how varied and heterogeneous a text is to determine if it was generated by a language model or a human.

This is the method used, for example, by GPTZero but it can lead to false positives and negatives.

However, even SynthID-text isn’t a foolproof method and the score tends to lower if the text is “thoroughly rewritten or translated to another language”.

Deepmind also developed tools to mark images and videos that are AI-generated by embedding a digital watermark directly into the pixels of an image or into each frame of a video invisible to the eye.

The watermark was made to be resistant to common image and video manipulations, such as cropping, resizing, compression, and adding filters.