I tested Google’s new SynthID detector on AI slop. There’s a big catch

Aw, have you seen that viral video of the little puppy nuzzling with a baby? It’s absolutely adorable — so adorable that it’s probably AI, although not even Reddit seems to know for sure. Now Google has unveiled a site featuring a tool designed to spot AI-generated images, videos, and audio files, using a technology called SynthID to pinpoint invisible watermarks embedded in AI-generated content. Surely the SynthID tool can tell us whether that suspicious puppy video was created by AI, right? I plopped the ultra-cute video into the tool, waited a few seconds, and got the result: no AI watermarks detected. So, the video must be real, right? Well, not exactly. Developed by Google as a method of tagging AI-generated content, SynthID allows AI models to embed invisible watermarks in the images, videos, audio files, and other content that they create. There’s even a version of SynthID for watermarking