Good morning! Hope you're starting the day off right.
In today's issue: a free new tool from Google that can tell you if a photo or video was made by AI, a one-tap trick to clean up noisy videos on a Samsung phone, and a warning about fake "ChatGPT" ads that can secretly infect your computer.
Let's get started.
NEWS
There's Now a Free Way to Check if a Photo or Video Was Made by AI
On October 7, Google opened up a free tool called SynthID Detector to everyone. Before this, only journalists and researchers on a waitlist could use it.
Here's what it does: a lot of AI-generated images, video, and audio — made by Google's own AI tools, and a growing list of partner companies — carries an invisible digital marker baked right into the file when it's created, kind of like a watermark on paper money that you can't see with the naked eye. SynthID Detector checks a file for that marker and tells you whether the file was made by one of those AI tools.
To try it, go to synthid.com and upload a photo, video, or audio clip. It's free, and you get about 10 checks a day.
There's one important catch: it can only recognize AI made by Google and its current partners — OpenAI, NVIDIA, and Kakao, with Apple listed as “coming soon.” It can't tell you anything about content made with other AI tools, and a “clean” result doesn't prove a photo or video is real — it might just come from a tool SynthID doesn't track, or have been edited enough to weaken the marker.
Takeaway: If a photo, video, or audio clip someone sends you ever seems off, synthid.com is a free, no-hassle way to check it for Google's AI watermark — just remember a clean result doesn't guarantee the content is real.
TRY THIS
Clean Up Noisy Videos on Your Samsung Phone With One Tap
If you've ever recorded a video — a grandkid's birthday, a voice memo, a phone video from a windy day outside — and the background noise drowned out the voices, Samsung's Galaxy phones have a free AI tool that can fix that.
It's called Audio Eraser. It listens to a video's sound and sorts it into different types — voices, music, wind, background noise — so you can turn each one up or down separately, instead of just muting the whole thing.
To use it: open the Gallery app, pick a video, and tap the pencil (Edit) icon. Then tap the Audio icon and choose “Audio eraser.” Use the sliders to lower the noise you don't want and bring up the voices you do, tap “Apply edits,” then “Save copy” to keep your cleaned-up version.
This works on Galaxy S and Z series phones, starting with the Galaxy S24 and newer, running a recent software update (One UI 7.0 or later). You'll need to be signed into a Samsung account.
Takeaway: Next time a video's background noise is drowning out the voices, open it in your Samsung Gallery app and try Audio eraser under the Edit menu — it's free and takes just a few taps.
— Samsung
STAYING SAFE
Watch Out for Fake "ChatGPT" Ads That Lead to a Computer Virus
Security researchers recently uncovered a scam that used real Google search ads to impersonate ChatGPT. Over about three months, scammers ran more than 70 ad campaigns pointing to roughly 850 fake ChatGPT pages, built to look like the real thing.
Here's how it worked: someone searching for ChatGPT would click what looked like a legitimate ad, land on a convincing fake page, and eventually be told they needed to complete a “verification” to prove they're human — supposedly like the squiggly-letter tests many websites use. But instead of a normal checkbox, the fake page told people to press two keys on their keyboard (Windows key + R), paste something, and hit Enter. Doing that secretly runs a hidden command that installs a harmful program, letting criminals access and control the computer remotely.
This trick is called “ClickFix,” and it's becoming common because it tricks people into doing the dirty work themselves, which can slip past some security software.
The easiest way to protect yourself: a real verification step never asks you to press the Windows key and “R,” paste something you copied, or type any command yourself. If any website — whether it claims to be ChatGPT or anything else — asks you to do that, close the page immediately. And when you're searching for a tool like ChatGPT, it's safer to type the address directly (chatgpt.com) or go through the official app than to click a search ad.
Takeaway: If any website ever asks you to press Windows+R, paste something, and hit Enter to “prove you're human,” close it immediately — that's not how real verification works, and it's a sign your computer is about to be infected.
Until tomorrow,
EZ AI