Is This Photo Real? How to Spot AI-Generated or Edited Images, Video and Text

A few years ago, faking a photo took skill, patience and special software. Today, anyone can make a convincing face, receipt, screenshot or paragraph in seconds, for free.

If your platform lets people upload things, you've probably already felt this. A seller posts a payment screenshot that looks a bit too clean. A new user has a profile picture that seems slightly off. An application arrives with an essay that reads like it came from a machine. And you're left asking: is this real?

Let's talk about how you can answer that, and also how not to misuse the answer.

First, an honest word about detectors

No tool can tell you with total certainty that an image is fake. Anyone who promises that is overselling.

What a good tool can do is show you evidence. It looks at an image from several angles and tells you what looked suspicious and why. Then you, a human, make the call, but with much better information than a gut feeling.

Where this shows up in real life

• Someone uploads a fake proof of payment to get goods released.
• A scammer uses a made-up profile photo for a fake seller or romance scam.
• An ID photo has been edited, with a changed name, date or face.
• A photo in a claim or dispute has been altered.
• A review, application or school assignment was written by a machine and passed off as human.

How image checks work

A single trick isn't reliable, so good detection stacks a few independent checks:

1. Where did it come from? Photos from a camera or phone usually carry details like the device model and the time they were taken. AI images normally don't. Careful, though. WhatsApp and many apps strip that information from genuine photos too, so missing details alone prove nothing.
2. How was it compressed? If a picture was edited and saved again, or stitched together from several sources, different parts can show different compression patterns.
3. What does the noise look like? Real cameras and AI generators leave different, invisible fingerprints in the fine grain of an image. Software can measure those.
4. Has a face been swapped in? When a face is pasted or regenerated onto another picture, the edges and lighting around it often don't quite agree with the rest of the photo.
5. What does a trained model think? A classifier trained on huge numbers of real and generated images picks up patterns that humans can't describe.

Our AI Content Detector runs all of these on our own servers, so your images aren't sent to some other company's AI service. And importantly, it tells you which signals fired, rather than giving you one mysterious percentage. Your reviewer can see why something looks suspicious.

What about video and text?

Video is checked by pulling out frames and running them through the same image checks, then adding a few checks on the video file itself.

Text is checked with two ideas. One is writing style, since machines tend to be unusually even. The other is how predictable the words are to a language model. Short or heavily edited text is genuinely hard to judge, so treat a text result as a reason to take a closer look, not a verdict.

How to read a result without fooling yourself

• A result like "likely authentic" or "likely generated" is an assessment, not proof.
• Look at the list of signals. Three different signals agreeing is much stronger than one weak one.
• False alarms happen. A genuine photo that has been screenshotted, compressed and retouched can look odd. Never reject a person based on one tool's output alone.
• Misses happen too. AI generators keep improving. A detector is one layer of defence, not the whole wall.

Making it part of your routine

A simple way to use it:

1. Scan uploads that matter, like proof of payment, ID photos and evidence in claims.
2. Let clear cases through and put the suspicious ones in a queue for a person.
3. Show the reviewer the signals so they can decide faster.
4. Keep a record of what you checked and decided.

If the upload is a face for an identity check, also add a liveness check. Spotting a fake photo and confirming a live person are two different jobs, and you want both.

Try it

You can check an image or a piece of text for free from the homepage. You don't even need an account for your first one. To build it into your own product, see the image scan endpoint. Video checks always cost a little because they use real computing power. And if you'd like a closer look at what the image signals mean, read Spotting AI-generated images.