Is This Image
AI Generated?
Upload the picture and get a plain-English answer — AI generated, edited, or a real photograph — along with the specific evidence behind it. Free, unlimited, no account.
Checking video or audio instead? Use the full checker.
Six tells you can check by eye
Before any tool gives you an answer, these are the things a picture editor looks at. None of them is conclusive alone; two or three together usually settle it.
Hands, teeth and ears
Generators still lose count. Look for a sixth finger, a thumb on the wrong side, teeth that merge into one band, or an ear whose folds don't repeat on the other side of the head. Crop in tight — at full-image size these read as normal.
Text that falls apart
Signage, book spines, license plates and logos are where models break down fastest. Real lettering stays consistent in stroke width and spacing; generated lettering drifts into shapes that look like letters until you try to read them.
Light that disagrees with itself
Find the shadows and trace them back. In a real photo every shadow in a scene points away from the same source and softens at the same rate. Generated scenes often light the subject from one direction and the background from another.
Reflections that don't match
Mirrors, windows, sunglasses, glossy floors and eye highlights all owe a debt to the scene in front of them. When a reflection shows a different arrangement of objects — or a person's two eyes catch differently shaped highlights — the image was assembled, not captured.
Skin and fabric that are too clean
Camera sensors record uneven noise, heavier in the shadows than the highlights. Generated skin tends to be uniformly smooth, and repeated textures like knitwear, brickwork or crowd faces often tile subtly instead of varying.
Backgrounds that dissolve
Look at the far edges of the frame. Real optics blur backgrounds evenly with distance; generated backgrounds smear into approximate shapes — bystanders with no faces, buildings whose windows don't line up, street furniture fused together.
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What the checker reads that your eyes can't
The camera's own record
Cameras write down make, model, lens, exposure and timestamp inside the file. Editors and image generators leave their own marks, and newer files can carry content credentials describing each step. A file claiming a camera that never shot that resolution has been through a pipeline nobody declared.
Compression and resave history
Every save stacks another compression layer onto a JPEG. When one region has been compressed a different number of times than its surroundings, something was pasted in. This is the single most reliable way to catch an edited real photo rather than a wholly generated one.
Noise structure
Sensor noise is uneven and predictable: stronger in shadows, tied to the sensor's colour filter layout. Generated images produce noise that is too uniform, or none at all in areas where a real exposure would have plenty.
When the answer will be uncertain
VTYAI says "not enough to tell" rather than guessing, and it is worth knowing when to expect that. Screenshots and downloads from social platforms have had their metadata stripped and their pixels recompressed, which erases most of the file-level evidence. Small crops leave too little area to measure noise across. Images that have been through heavy filtering, upscaling or "enhance" features carry generator-like traces even when the original was a genuine photograph. In all of these cases, chasing down the original file — from the person who took it, or via a reverse image search for an earlier posting — will tell you more than any detector.
Common questions
- How can I tell if an image is AI generated?
- Upload it above. VTYAI reads the file's hidden camera data, its compression and resave history, and its grain, lighting and texture patterns, then tells you whether it looks AI generated, edited, or authentic — and which specific findings led there. By eye, the fastest checks are hands and fingers, text on signs and labels, reflections that don't match their source, and backgrounds that dissolve into mush at the edges.
- Is this AI image checker free?
- Yes. Every check is free and unlimited, with no account and no sign-up. The site is supported by ads. VTYAI Pro exists only for people who want an ad-free experience.
- Which images can I check?
- Any JPEG, PNG, WebP, HEIC or similar picture file up to 18 MB. Screenshots work, but they lose the original camera data, so the answer leans more on visual analysis and the confidence will usually be lower.
- Can an AI image detector be wrong?
- Yes, and any tool claiming otherwise is overselling. Detectors flag statistical patterns, not proof. Heavily compressed, cropped or reposted images lose much of the evidence, and some generators now imitate camera noise deliberately. That is why VTYAI shows you every finding instead of a single score, so you can weigh the evidence yourself.
- Does a screenshot from social media still work?
- It works, but it is the hardest case. Uploading strips metadata and recompresses the picture, wiping the resave trail that makes tampering visible. Whenever you can, track down and check the original file instead.