Fake news photo checker

Three ways a news photo is fake

Professional fact-checkers sort misleading images into roughly three groups, and each needs a different check.

Generated

An image model created the whole scene: an explosion near a landmark, a politician being arrested, a flooded city. These spread fastest when they confirm what people already fear. The detector on this page is built for them: it reads generator credentials and runs a neural classifier that recognises the statistics of generated pixels.

Manipulated

A genuine photo with something added, removed or changed — a weapon placed in a hand, a sign rewritten, a crowd enlarged. Modern manipulation is often done with AI editing tools. If the editor recorded it, GPTTrace reports an “edited with generative AI” credential. If not, crop to the suspicious region and check it separately.

Mis-captioned

The most common kind: a real, unedited photo presented with the wrong time, place or story. No detector can catch this, because nothing about the pixels is false. Reverse image search, geolocation and contacting the source are the only defences.

Reading a detector result during a breaking story

Images circulating on social platforms have usually been re-encoded several times, stripping metadata and blurring fine detail. Expect fewer “proof” results and more probabilities. A high classifier score on a dramatic image with no traceable source is a strong reason not to share it. A low score does not make an image trustworthy — it may simply be a real photo from somewhere else.

Look at the list of reasons. Camera metadata that names a phone and a capture time from the day of the event supports authenticity; a generator-standard size such as 1024×1024 with no camera data points the other way. When the result is inconclusive, the steps above will settle it more reliably than another tool.

Tools fact-checkers use

Beyond this detector: reverse image search engines for the earliest copy, satellite and street-level imagery for geolocation, sun-position calculators for checking shadows against the claimed time, and archive services for finding deleted original posts.