OpenAI says it’s getting serious about AI detection and labeling

OpenAI is announcing updates today that aim to make it easier for people to identify when online content has been generated using its AI models. Alongside strengthening its commitment to embedding generated works with C2PA content credentials — currently the most recognized provenance standard for checking how image, video, and audio content was made or edited — OpenAI will now also apply Google’s SynthID watermarks to provide a “multi-layered approach” for AI labeling tools.

“These two systems reinforce each other. C2PA helps content carry detailed context; SynthID helps preserve a signal when metadata does not survive,” OpenAI said in its announcement. “Watermarking can be more durable through transformations like screenshots, while metadata can provide more information than a watermark alone. Together, they make provenance more resilient than either layer would be on its own.”

SynthID watermarking will initially be applied to images generated by ChatGPT, Codex, or the OpenAI API. The callout for metadata preservation is interesting — anecdotally, I’ve seen SynthID used more reliably by fact checkers and media agencies to verify deepfake images online compared to C2PA. This expansion to cover both could make content generated by OpenAI less likely to slip through gaps in verification systems, making deepfakes easier to distinguish and helping online platforms to label generated or AI-manipulated content for their users.

As part of this expansion, OpenAI is also previewing a public verification portal that will allow users to see if images carry AI metadata or watermarks. When an image is uploaded, the portal will check C2PA and SynthID provenance signals to flag if it was generated with ChatGPT, the OpenAI API, or Codex. This is limited to images generated by OpenAI to start, but the company says it aims to support other verification systems in the coming months and eventually expand to more types of content that people encounter online.

“No detection method is foolproof, so we take a cautious approach in cases when detection fails,” OpenAI writes. “If no metadata or watermark is detected, for example, the tool will not make a definitive conclusion about whether the image was generated with OpenAI tools since provenance signals can in some cases be stripped.”

OpenAI has also joined the C2PA Conformance Program. According to the program description, this “provides assurance that products adhere to the Content Credentials specification, and fulfill a set of security requirements to ensure they are producing and validating C2PA data correctly.” It’s worth noting that OpenAI has been embedding C2PA data into image and video content for some time, however, and the system has done little to help with reliably identifying OpenAI’s deepfake content in the wild. That’s because the metadata can be easily removed when it leaves the platform it was originally posted to — some platforms even accidentally remove it during the upload process.