Apple has started marking images made or changed with some of its Apple Intelligence tools with an invisible SynthID watermark, according to a report from 9to5Mac. The change arrived with iOS 27.2 and its sibling releases.
What Apple says
Citing a support document from Apple, 9to5Mac reports that certain Apple Intelligence features "will add an invisible SynthID watermark to images that you create or edit." The behavior begins with iOS 27.2, iPadOS 27.2, macOS 27.2 and visionOS 27.2.
Which tools are affected
The support document lists Clean Up, Extend and Spatial Reframing in the Photos app, along with Image Playground and Image Wand. Image Playground produces entirely new pictures, so tagging its output is straightforward. The more notable detail is that genuine photographs are tagged as well once they have been edited with Clean Up, Extend or Spatial Reframing.
What users will notice
According to 9to5Mac, the watermark leaves no visible trace. Neither the owner of a photo nor anyone it is shared with will see anything different unless the image is deliberately run through a SynthID detector. Apple points people to the SynthID website, where an image can be uploaded to check for the tag.
9to5Mac's article does not describe how the watermark is embedded, and this report does not either. Apple's wording, as quoted, covers the tools and the software versions, but not the technical method.
Why it matters
Labeling AI-generated and AI-altered pictures has become a recurring topic as image-editing tools grow more capable. An invisible, machine-readable tag gives a detector a way to flag an image as having been touched by such a tool, without adding a visible mark that would spoil a photo. Whether other apps and services will check for the tag was not addressed in the report.
The update is already available, with 9to5Mac noting that the feature arrived last week. Anyone who regularly uses Clean Up or Extend on their library should be aware that those edited images now carry the tag.
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