About Verity
Verity is a free tool for anyone who has just been sent a photo, video or voice clip and thought: is this real? You drop the file in, or paste a link to a post, and you get a plain-language verdict in a few seconds — no jargon, no account, no cost.
Why it exists
Generating a convincing fake used to take a studio. Today it takes a sentence typed into a free website. The tools that detect fakes, meanwhile, are mostly sold to newsrooms and banks at enterprise prices, behind logins and sales calls. Most people who need an answer are a parent looking at a video of their child's school, a buyer looking at a listing photo, or someone about to forward a clip to a group chat. Verity is built for them: one screen, one answer, free.
How a check works
When you submit a file, Verity examines the media itself rather than searching the web for where it came from. The analysis looks at several independent signals:
- Generation artefacts. Image and video models leave characteristic traces — over-smooth skin and fabric, texture that repeats where it should vary, lighting that does not agree between a face and its background, hands and teeth and jewellery that lose their structure under magnification, and text in the scene that dissolves into letter-shaped noise.
- Physical consistency. Real cameras obey optics. Shadows fall away from one light source, reflections agree with the objects that cast them, perspective lines converge, and depth of field falls off smoothly. Synthetic scenes routinely break one of these while looking perfect at a glance.
- Editing signatures. An otherwise real photo that has had a person, object or figure changed usually shows a local discontinuity: a patch of different noise, a softened boundary, compression that does not match its surroundings.
- File metadata. Where it survives, metadata can show the camera make, the editing software, or the absence of any capture data at all. Metadata is easily stripped or forged, so it supports a verdict but never decides one on its own.
What the verdicts mean
Nothing in the file points to generation or editing. This is an absence of evidence, not proof of origin — a careful fake can pass.
Something is inconsistent, but the cause is ambiguous. Heavy compression, a beauty filter, a screenshot of a screenshot and a deliberate edit can all land here. Treat it as a reason to look closer, not as an accusation.
Multiple strong signals of synthetic origin appear together. This is the verdict we are most confident about, and still not a certainty.
Where Verity is wrong
We would rather tell you this up front than have you discover it on something that matters. No detector is reliable enough to be evidence on its own, ours included.
- Re-compression destroys signal. A photo that has been through three messaging apps has lost much of the fine detail a detector reads. Always check the highest-quality copy you can get.
- Real media can look fake. Studio lighting, portrait mode, aggressive phone processing and ordinary retouching all create the same smoothness that generators do. Professional photography raises false alarms more often than snapshots.
- Fakes can look real. A generated image that has been printed, photographed, cropped and compressed can shed the traces that give it away.
- Detection lags generation. Every new model release changes the artefacts. There is a window after each one where detectors are weakest.
- Audio is hardest. Short clips, phone-quality recordings and background noise all reduce what can be read from a voice.
Use a Verity verdict as one input. The strongest check is still provenance: who published this first, when, and does any independent source have the same moment from a different angle? Our source verification guide walks through doing that by hand.
How we make money
Checks are free and unlimited, and we would like to keep them that way. The site is funded by advertising shown around the content, and by an optional Pro subscription that removes the ads for people who use Verity often. We do not sell the files you submit, and advertisers have no involvement in what a verdict says. Pricing is on the pricing page; what we do with your data is set out in our privacy policy.
Who runs it
Verity is an independent project, built and maintained by a small team rather than a newsroom, a platform or a government body. We are not affiliated with any of the AI companies whose output we analyse. If a verdict looks wrong to you, tell us — disagreements are the most useful feedback we get, and they shape what we fix next. Write to us at hello@vtyai.app or through the contact page.
Start with a check
Drop in a photo, video or clip and see the full breakdown for yourself.
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