https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/16/23963607/google-deepmind-synthid-audio-watermarks

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Google is embedding inaudible watermarks right into its AI generated
music

Google is embedding inaudible watermarks right into its AI generated
music

/

SynthID will be used to watermark audio from DeepMind's Lyria model,
so it's possible to work out if Google's AI tech has been used in the
creation of a track.

By Jon Porter, a reporter with five years of experience covering
consumer tech releases, EU tech policy, online platforms, and
mechanical keyboards.

Nov 16, 2023, 11:38 AM UTC|

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Audio created using Google DeepMind's AI Lyria model, such as tracks
made with YouTube's new audio generation features, will be
watermarked with SynthID to let people identify their AI-generated
origins after the fact. In a blog post, DeepMind said the watermark
shouldn't be detectable by the human ear and "doesn't compromise the
listening experience," and added that it should still be detectable
even if an audio track is compressed, sped up or down, or has extra
noise added.

Watermarking tools like SynthID are seen as an important safeguard
against some of the harms of generative AI. President Joe Biden's
executive order on artificial intelligence, for example, calls for a
new set of government-led standards for watermarking AI-generated
content. It's a promising area, but current technologies are far from
a silver bullet to defend against fakes.

According to DeepMind, SynthID's audio implementation works by
"converting the audio wave into a two-dimensional visualization that
shows how the spectrum of frequencies in a sound evolves over time."
It claims the approach is "unlike anything that exists today."

The news that Google is embedding the watermarking feature into
AI-generated audio comes just a few short months after the company
released SynthID in beta for images created by Imagen on Google
Cloud's Vertex AI. The watermark is resistant to editing like
cropping or resizing, although DeepMind cautioned that it's not
foolproof against "extreme image manipulations."

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