How to Tell If an Image Is AI-Generated
Summary: The 30-Second Answer The detector sites that score an image “87% AI” are guessing. Classifier-based detectors fail on generators they were not trained on, and they flag real photos as fake. What actually proves something is a provenance signal: C2PA Content Credentials (metadata) and SynthID (an invisible watermark baked into the pixels). Three checks, in order: drop the file into openai.com/verify, ask the Gemini app “is this made with AI”, and read the metadata at c2paviewer.com. A found signal is strong evidence. No signal found is not evidence the image is real: a screenshot, a re-upload or a format conversion is often enough to erase it. Google says SynthID is now inside more than 100 billion images and videos, and the “is this AI” check in Gemini has been used 50 million times. Someone sends you a photo and you want to know whether a camera took it. The first thing most people do is search “AI image detector”, paste it into the first site that ranks, and read a percentage. That number is close to meaningless, and this article is mostly about what to do instead. ...