Google’s AI detection tool for text is going free

Google, under its DeepMind AI research lab division, announced the SynthID AI tool last year to identify AI-generated images, video, audio, and text. This tool scans and tells you whether the content you see or hear on the web is human-made or generated by an AI tool.

While this tool was available for over a year, it wasn’t free for everyone. Now, however, Google confirmed that SynthID’s text watermarking tool will be available for free. 

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Google on X (formerly Twitter) confirmed that it is open-souring SynthID’s text watermarking tool. This means that anyone can use the tool for free to identify AI-generated content. However, note that only developers and businesses can use the tool and not consumers. 

How does SynthID’s text watermarking tool work?

SynthID’s text watermarking tool can not only identify AI-generated text but can also embed an imperceptible watermark to text, allowing users to label AI-generated text copies. 

SynthID’s text watermarking tool identifies whether a text copy is AI-generated or not by encoding tokens. Tokens are prompts like “What’s your favourite fruit?” or “Explain quantum mechanics to me like I’m five,” and similar phrases. 

Tokens can be full phrases like the ones mentioned above or a word or a single character. Each token is assigned a score, which is the percentage chance of it being the correct one. Tokens that have higher scores are used to further identify AI-generated text. 

SynthID then repeats these steps to get a logical response. During this process, SythID embeds an imperceptible watermark by introducing additional information in the token distribution. The final pattern of scores for both the model’s word choice and the adjusted probability scores is considered the watermark. 

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These scores are then compared with the expected pattern of scores for watermarked and unwatermarked text, allowing the tool to successfully detect AI-generated text. 

While this AI text identification process may seem lengthy, it does not limit the tool’s accuracy, quality, and speed. As solid as it may sound, SynthID’s watermark can sometimes be removed simply by running it through a language translation app. 

Nonetheless, it’s great to see Google’s AI detection tool is going free for developers and businesses, as it may come in handy for them for various purposes.