Why Snapchat Will Soon Display Watermarks on AI-Generated Images

Snapchat announced on Tuesday that it will soon start adding a watermark to the artificial intelligence (AI)-generated images created using its tools. The platform allows its premium users to generate AI images through the platform’s native conversational chatbot ‘My AI’ and its Dreams feature. The watermark will be a visual addition to highlight that it was created synthetically and will be shown for images shared in the app as well as when they are exported to a user’s camera roll.

In a post on its website, parent company Snap highlighted the wide range of AI-powered features it has added since 2015 such as AR Lenses, My AI, Generative AI Chat Wallpaper, and more. It also mentions the company’s efforts to be more transparent when users are interacting with AI-powered content on its platform.

Snapchat says it will begin adding a watermark to all of its AI-generated images for increased transparency. This will apply to images generated from the My AI bot or background generation through Dreams. The watermark is a visual marker of Snapchat’s ghost logo along with the sparkle icon which has become representative of AI.

The company’s support page on generative AI has warned users against removing its ‘Ghost with sparkles’ watermark from AI-generated images, adding that doing so is a violation of the platform’s terms and conditions.

Notably, OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 images follow the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) protocol and add AI-related information into the metadata of the images. Google also has its own watermarking technology called SynthID for multimedia content created using its tools.

Snapchat also says that all of the AI features on the platform undergo a strict internal review and AI red teaming to identify and remove any potential flaws in the AI model. Red teaming is a tactic used by companies where it lets external independent groups stress test the feature to reveal any flaws.

Currently, only Snapchat+ users can access My AI to create AI-generated images, although all users can create up to eight Dream images. Both features were added by the company last year. In India, Snapchat+ subscription is priced at Rs. 49 a month or Rs. 499 for a year.