Google Search To Show If An Image Is AI Generated, Edited Or Taken With Camera

Google Search will soon label images as AI-generated, edited with photo editing software or if it was taken with a camera in the image search results. This label will be added to the about this image feature, according to The Verge who spoke to Laurie Richardson, vice president of trust and safety at Google.

“Google is planning to roll out a technology that will identify whether a photo was taken with a camera, edited by software like Photoshop, or produced by generative AI ******. In the coming months, Google’s search results will include an updated “about this image feature” to let people know if an image was created or edited with AI tools,” Tom Warren wrote.

The thing is, Google had something similar in May 2023 when it showed if an image was AI-generated, if the site had meta data, Digital Source Type IPTC docs, to specify it was.

Here is what that looked like:

This new method will use Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) technical standard, which was adopted by Amazon, Microsoft, Adobe, Arm, OpenAI, Intel, Truepic, and Google. Google will soon integrate it into Google Search.

Of course, clicking deep into the about this image and looking for that label, won’t be something most searchers do.

This will also be added to ads and YouTube. But as a reminder, Google is pushing advertisers to use AI for images in ads or to supplement the images in their ads, for a while.

The Verge wrote:

Google also plans to integrate C2PA metadata into its ad systems. “Our goal is to ramp this up over time and use C2PA signals to inform how we enforce key policies,” says Richardson. “We’re also exploring ways to relay C2PA information to viewers on YouTube when content is captured with a camera, and we’ll have more updates on that later in the year.”

You can learn more about this on the Google blog.

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