The Google tool, which is initially available in English in the USA, is intended to provide information about, among other things, when an image and similar images were first indexed by Google, where it may have first appeared, where else it has been seen online.
Such background information about an image should help to better assess whether an image is trustworthy or whether it is better to take a second look at it. With About this image, it should be possible to see, among other things, whether an image was generated by an artificial intelligence.
This tool will be found by users clicking on the three dots on an image in Google Image results, searching with an image or screenshot in Google Lens, or swiping up in the Google app when they come across an image on a page they want to learn more about. Later this year, it should be possible to use Google Lens by right-clicking or long-pressing on an image in Chrome on desktop and mobile.
Google also announced that, as part of the introduction of generative image features, it will ensure that each of the images generated with Google AI will be tagged with a marker in the original file. Creators and users will be able to add similar markers, so you can see a marker in images in Google Search that identifies them as AI-generated. Google suspects it will see similar in the coming months from various AI systems like Midjourney, Shutterstock and others.
Google announces that it will introduce a new tool called About this image in the coming months, which is intended to help identify the context of origin of images. AI images in particular should be identifiable in this way.