Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai delivers the keynote speech at the Google I/O developer conference at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California, May 10, 2023.
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Google will embed information, called markers, in images created by its AI models to warn people that they were originally created by computers, wednesday said.
The data in the image is invisible to the human eye, but software like Google Search can read it and display a label warning the user. Google will also provide additional information about all AI-generated images to help prevent deception, including when the image was first uploaded to the search engine and whether it was cited by a news site.
“Image self-labeled as AI-generated,” reads a sample warning provided by Google.
The move is the most significant effort yet by a major tech company to label and classify the output of so-called generative artificial intelligence. Officials and tech workers warn that the technology’s ability to create lifelike images or smooth passages of text could help spammers, scammers and propagandists fool people.
For example, the recently generated image of Pope Francis a stylish winter jacket The image, generated on the Midjourney app, went viral, misleading some people into thinking it was real.
One problem facing the AI industry is that there is no reliable way to determine which images are generated. While there are often clues, such as poorly drawn hands, there’s no clear way to tell which images are computer-generated and which are drawn or photographed by humans.
Google’s approach is to label images as they come out of the AI system, rather than later trying to determine if they are real. Google says Shutterstock and Midjourney will support this new tagging method. Google Developer Documentation Indicative markers will be able to classify images as trained algorithmic media, made by AI models, synthetic images partially made by AI models, or algorithmic media, created by computers but not based on training data.
Google held its annual developer conference on Wednesday, announcing a $1,799 folding phone and additional artificial intelligence features for other Google products, including an image generator.
