Just like the title says. Is there any way to control AI content on my phone and/or my home computer?
This is going to sound snarky, but…
There’s always the OFF switch. Although I’m not sure I trust it anymore, either - especially on the phone.
Any app ‘smart’ enough to reliably detect AI generated content would almost have to be an AI itself…
It’s not that it’s snarky, it’s that it’s pointless. That’s like asking if there’s a way to skip the commercials on Netflix and someone telling you to stop watching Netflix.
There’s plenty of random apps that claim to do it, how well they work, I don’t know. But I believe Gemini has an app that will allow you to check for (Gemini) watermarks.
Edit, looks like, at least for Gemini created images, you can ask gemini (aka Google) to check it for you.
Simply upload the image, video or audio clip to your chat, and ask if it’s been created or altered by Google AI. Gemini will check for a SynthID watermark, and let you know if it finds one.
Moderating
You’re right, that sounds snarky, and it is clearly not what the OP is looking for.
This is FQ. Less snark, more facts, please.
For text, at least, this is a question of great interest to teachers. There are a lot of tools that claim to recognize AI, but it’s tough to tell how reliable they are. Some of them are bundled with tools to modify AI text to make it “look more real”; of course, this raises all sorts of questions about conflict of interest and other ethical issues (though, in my experience, the “humanized” text unsurprisingly looks even more AI-generated (because it is)).
Sorry - I stepped in with my foot in my mouth. But I was serious - if we have to use a tool to tell if we are dealing with AI, how do we trust the tool? We are seeing reports of AI agents escaping the confinements of the test suites - and by definition such reports are of the the incidents that have been noticed. What haven’t we noticed? Human content creators can choose to watermark images and texts - but lack of such a watermark would not necessarily imply an AI source. Any attempt to mandate that AI content be clearly identified as such is bound to be circumvented. So I can imagine a browser filter that only allows verifiably human generated content, but that’s not what the OP is looking for, and would impose an enormous effort on human creators. Not to mention it would block whale songs and elephant paintings…
The search engine DuckDuckGo offers a version called NOAI which claims to filter out:
- AI-assisted answers
- AI-generated images
- AI feature suggestions
Obviously that isn’t a panacea, but it’s a useful tool.
It’s my default searcher, and works fine. I don’t know how effective it actually is.
Open AI has its own implementation of Synth ID and needs to be checked here:
https://openai.com/research/verify/
The two don’t cross check. Gemini only knows Gemini Synth IDs and Open AI can only detect Open AI Synth IDs. This is different than asking an AI whether a picture is AI generated or not. Those results and AI detection websites are not reliable. This looks for an actual provenance watermark in the pixels of the image, and the digital fingerprint can survive resolution changes of the images as well as cropping. I think it can sometimes detect it in pictures of printed AI material, too.
What it tells you for almost certain is whether an image was output through Gemini or ChatGPT or any Google or OpenAI products (not sure what others there are). It does not tell you whether the image was created of whole cloth or based on another image. If you put a photograph you took through Gemini and asked it to, say, soften your skin, the resulting image will have a SynthID on it. Also, false negatives are possible. An image can be manipulated enough to mangle the SynthID so it can’t be reliably detected. Most of the time, though, I see SynthIDs intact. I don’t think people have reliably found a way around them, or care enough, because the average user doesn’t even know how to use this technology.
As for the OP, I am not aware of any reliable way to do this. Short of requiring metadata or something that flags AI on all AI content, I don’t see a conceivable way this could work right now, even using AI to detect AI which, as I stated, is unreliable as all hell.
There are sometimes clear “tells” for AI text, such as some Claude-isms well known by now in the tech world. It will also watermark its own text using an interesting algorithm, replacing words with specially tagged synonyms: https://youtu.be/Cmi-1QSaptA?is=cTGudLgTYROfFzVC
Noentheless, I agree with the other posters here. If you do find a watermark, it’s AI generated (false positives should be extremely rare). But if you DON’T find a watermark, that doesn’t prove a human wrote or edited it. False negatives are very common, and it’s easy to make the AI write in a different voice than normal. The non-watermark AI detectors, as far as I know, are mostly snake oil.
Kagi.com is a paid search engine that goes one step further: it lets you block entire domains, and see what others have blocked too. There are a lot of AI spam sites now that just capitalize on search keywords with SEO fluff, so that’s pretty useful.
Where it fails is being able to detect PARTIAL AI content mixed in with human text. I don’t know of any system that can do that reliably.