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A software developer claims to have reverse-engineered Google DeepMind’s SynthID system, showing how AI watermarks can be stripped from generated images or manually inserted into other works. A claim that, according to Google, isn’t true.
The developer, going by the username Aloshdenny, has open-sourced their work on GitHub and documented his process, claiming all it required was 200 Gemini-generated images, signal processing, and “way too much free time.” A little weed also seemed to help.
“No neural networks. No proprietary access,” Aloshdenny said on Medium. “Turns out if you’re unemployed and average enough ‘pure black’ AI-generated images, every nonzero pixel is literally just the watermark staring back at you.”
SynthID is a near-invisible watermarking system that tags content generated by Google’s AI tools, embedding itself in the pixels of images at the point of creation. It was designed to be difficult to remove without degrading the image quality, and is used widely across the AI products offered by Google — everything spat out by models like Nano Banana and Veo 3 carries SynthID watermarks, and it’s even being applied to YouTube’s AI-generated creator clones.
Here’s a comparison between an image with SynthID still attached (left) and how it appears after the SynthID has been partially removed enough to fool detectors (right). There are only slight visual differences, showing minimal degradation from the removal process. Image: Aloshdenny
Aloshdenny says he found the system to be “genuinely good engineering,” and was still unable to remove SynthID entirely in tests, instead relying on confusing SynthID decoders that try to read watermarked images.
The process used to crack the underlying mechanics of Google’s watermark is technically complex for non-developers. You can read the full breakdown on Aloshdenny’s Medium page (which was apparently written up while Aloshdenny was “high”) if you’re curious, but here’s a simplified explainer:
Generate 200 entirely black or pure white images using Gemini. Enhance the contrast and saturation, and then denoise the saturation to expose the watermark patterns.
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