Watermark
An imperceptible signal embedded in AI-generated content to identify it as synthetic.
An AI watermark is an intentional, imperceptible signal embedded into generated content so that a verifier can later confirm it came from a specific model. The watermark survives common transformations like compression, cropping, or paraphrasing — robustness is the whole point.
Major examples: SynthID (Google, image + text), DALL-E provenance (OpenAI, via C2PA), Meta's invisible image watermark, and several research watermarks proposed for academic LLMs.
Watermarks are different from EXIF and C2PA. Those are metadata fields anyone can strip. A real watermark is encoded into the content itself — pixel intensities or token distributions — and surviving compression makes naive removal impossible.
SynthGuard's pipeline neutralizes the major public watermarks via spectral disruption and token-distribution rewriting. The image stays visibly identical; the watermark stops being detectable.