Real or AI? This new ‘slop detector’ can spare you embarrassment — or worse

AI slop is everywhere. It is strewn across the internet, stuffed into social feeds, and even popping up in real-world printed materials. If you have a good eye or you’re simply wise to bad imagery, you may be able to spot these on your own. If not, Google has an AI slop detector designed to make it easier to tell fake images from real ones.

The tool is called SynthID Detector. Why SynthID, you ask? The moniker is borrowed from the namesake of Google’s invisible digital watermark embedded into every image created with Nano Banana, the image generation tool found in Google Gemini. Every time you make an image with Gemini, it contains invisible digital noise that tells other apps and services that the image was