Google DeepMind has created a tool, SynthID Text, for detecting AI-generated text and is releasing it as open source.
Pushmeet Kohli, vice president of research at Google DeepMind disclosed the development in a journal seen by Newsng on Wednesday.
SynthID is one of several watermarking technologies for generative AI outputs. Last year, the business introduced a picture watermark, which has since been expanded to include an AI-generated video watermark.
In May, Google revealed that it was using SynthID in its Gemini app and online chatbots and that it was publicly available on Hugging Face, an open library of AI data sets and models.
Watermarks have emerged as a significant technique for assisting humans in determining whether something is generated by AI, potentially aiding in the fight against harms like misinformation.
Newsng understands that Google has already included the new watermarking technique into its Gemini chatbot, the firm stated today.
It has also open-sourced the technology and made it available to developers and businesses, allowing them to use it to verify whether text outputs were generated by their large language models (LLMs), the AI systems that power chatbots.
However, only Google and those developers currently have access to the detector that looks for the watermark.
“We’re open-sourcing our SynthID Text watermarking tool,” the company wrote in a post on X. “Available freely to developers and businesses, it will help them identify their AI-generated content.”
However, the company recognizes that its watermarking approach has limits.
For example, SynthID Text does not function well with brief text, text that has been modified or translated from another language, or responses to factual queries.
On responses to factual prompts, there are fewer opportunities to adjust the token distribution without affecting the factual accuracy,” explains the company. “This includes prompts like ‘What is the capital of France?,’ or queries where little or no variation is expected, like ‘recite a William Wordsworth poem.’”
We earlier reported that Google initiated talks with the Italian government regarding plans to set up base stations in Sicily to build the infrastructure for a Mediterranean underwater fibre optic cable system.
