FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
Ordinary questions first. Technical language underneath.
- Can MediaChecker tell if a photo is AI-generated?
- It can report synthetic indicators remaining in the file, with a confidence and evidence-quality label. It does not promise 100% accuracy and it does not call a person a fake.
- Can you tell if a video is a deepfake?
- Professional video signals look for face-swap, temporal identity flicker, and synthetic texture. Many viral clips are too transcoded for a strong class. Uncertainty is a valid output.
- Is an AI detector always accurate?
- No. Detectors fail on new generators, heavy compression, and mixed media. That is why MediaChecker uses eight independent engines instead of one score.
- Can an edited photo still be real?
- Yes. A camera capture can be cropped, colour-graded, or object-removed and still depict a real scene. Manipulation and synthetic are separate axes.
- Can metadata prove an image is authentic?
- No. Metadata is provenance: who, when, which camera, whether a C2PA manifest is present. It is not authenticity. It can be stripped or forged.
- What is a secondary capture?
- A file that photographed or screenshot another display of the media: a screen, a print, or another photograph.
- Can MediaChecker detect screenshots?
- The system looks for signs that media was recaptured from a screen or a print. A patterned fence is not automatically a monitor.
- What happens when an image is copied multiple times?
- Each save spends originality. Social apps re-encode. The picture may still be of a real moment. The file is no longer first-generation.
- Does MediaChecker store my images?
- This demo analyzes in the browser and does not retain media on the server. Signed-in usage counts are stored as a number, not as the file.
- What does Generation Originality mean?
- How close this file is to a first-generation encode. A real photo can receive a low originality score if it is a fifth-generation export.
- Can a real photo receive a low originality score?
- Yes. That is the point of the axis. Originality is not a moral verdict.
- Does MediaChecker work with Facebook images?
- Yes, as in-feed social copies. A Facebook share URL is not the original. Use the extension to sample on-screen pixels, or upload a camera-roll original if you have one.
- Can social media compression affect forensic analysis?
- Yes. Platform transcode discards first-generation evidence. The report will label the object as a social copy and lower evidence quality.