AI image detectors estimate whether a picture was generated or altered by AI rather than captured by a camera, scanning for the visual artifacts and statistical traces that synthetic images tend to leave behind. They also help flag deepfakes and manipulated photos. Tools such as AI or Not, Hive, Facia, and Sensity return a likelihood that an image is fake.
Journalists, trust-and-safety teams, and fact-checkers use these to vet images before they spread, while platforms run them at scale to catch manipulated media. Accuracy is a moving target, though: image generators improve constantly, so a detector trained on last year's models can miss this year's output. Treat a result as one clue in a wider verification process, and confirm anything important with the original source.