AI Content Got Too Real. Now OpenAI and Nvidia Are Using Google’s Watermarking System. - Firethering
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HomeTechAI Content Got Too Real. Now OpenAI and Nvidia Are Using Google’s...
AI Content Got Too Real. Now OpenAI and Nvidia Are Using Google’s Watermarking System.
By Mohit Geryani
May 24, 2026
Last updated: May 24, 2026
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Three years ago, Google introduced a watermarking system for AI-generated content called SynthID. Nobody was required to use it. It was just Google’s answer to a problem the rest of the industry hadn’t fully admitted existed yet.
Now OpenAI is using it. So is Nvidia. So are ElevenLabs and Kakao. And Google says SynthID has already been applied to 100 billion images and videos, plus 60,000 years worth of audio.
The timing matters. AI-generated images and video have gotten good enough that the old tells, the extra fingers, the smeared text, the wrong shadows, are mostly gone. What replaces them as a detection method isn’t human judgment. It’s watermarking inserted into the content at the point of generation, before it ever reaches anyone’s feed. SynthID is Google’s bet on how that works at scale, and a growing number of the industry’s biggest names are now betting alongside it.
Table of Contents
Why SynthID is harder to remove
Most AI content labeling today relies on metadata. A file gets tagged at creation describing how it was made, which tools were used, whether generative elements were involved. Google uses this approach too, through the C2PA standard, and its Pixel 10 phones now embed that information directly into photos and videos at capture.
The problem with metadata is that it’s removable. Screenshot a tagged image and the metadata doesn’t come with it. Run it through a compression tool, crop it, repost it somewhere that strips file information, and the label is gone. The content looks clean even if it wasn’t.
SynthID works differently. The watermark lives in the pixels of an image or video, in the waveform of an audio file. It’s not attached to the file, it’s woven into the content itself. According to Google DeepMind scientist Pushmeet Kohli, the system was specifically engineered to survive the kinds of transformations people actually use: compression, cropping, rotation, format conversion.
That robustness is what makes it worth building around. A watermark that disappears when someone screenshots it isn’t a watermark, it’s a suggestion. SynthID is designed to persist through the ways content actually travels across the internet, which is why the detection side of the system can still find it even after the file has been through several hands.
Some researchers have claimed to find methods for removing SynthID patterns. Google’s position is that none of these bypasses actually work at scale. That’s a claim worth watching as adoption grows and the incentive to crack it increases.
What changes when OpenAI and Nvidia are in
The limitation of SynthID until now was straightforward: it only labeled content that Google’s own models generated. Every image from Midjourney, every video from Sora, voice clone from any of a dozen startups came with no SynthID watermark at all. Detection tools trained on SynthID patterns were only useful for a fraction of what was actually circulating.
That changes when OpenAI adds SynthID to GPT-2 image generation and Nvidia adds it to its Cosmos world foundation models. GPT-2 images are already widely used and Cosmos is Nvidia’s foundation for video and simulation content generation. ElevenLabs is one of the most widely used AI voice platforms available. Kakao has significant reach across Asian markets.
None of this closes the gap entirely. Open source models exist specifically so anyone can generate content on their own terms with no watermarking required. That category isn’t going anywhere. But the calculus shifts when the major commercial generators are all stamping their output with the same system. The content most people encounter from mainstream tools starts carrying a detectable signal. The content that doesn’t becomes more conspicuous by its...