Google Photos working on a feature to help you tell AI-generated images and real ones apart

One of generative AI's popular features is image generation, and we see plenty of AI-generated images online nowadays. You can edit an existing image with AI or create a realistic one from a prompt, and many such images are flooding the internet, for good or for bad. Of course, spotting a real image from an AI-generated or AI-edited image is getting harder and harder now that AI is learning to better do image manipulation.

But telling those apart is important, and Google seems to be working on a way to help you do just that. Google Photos could be able to display information that would help you identify AI images.

The info about this has been found in the code of the Google Photos app by the folks at Android Authority. References about this feature were discovered in Google Photos v7.3, and these clues show that the app may be able to help you identify AI images soon.

Reportedly, the app will be able to show credits for a given photo. For example, images made with Google Gemini will come with a "Made with Google AI" credit tab, and this can be accessed in the EXIF data of the image. Also, Google Photos images have tags like "AI-Generated with Google Photos" or "AI-Generated with Google" which gets added to your image EXIF data when you use features like Magic Editor.

On top of that, Android Authority found a reference to the “compositeWithTrainedAlgorithmicMedia” value, which Google Photos uses when an image has been edited or enhanced using a generative AI model. Possibly, Google Photos may be able to also say which generative AI model the image was generated by.

All this info will reportedly be easily accessible to users in the image details section. Of course, this feature is not yet live or available to the public, but it is possible it will come soon.

I really like this feature as it's now getting harder to tell AI-generated images apart from real ones. I'd love to be able to know what image was edited and modified using AI, and I can't wait for this feature to be live.