Practical guides for checking video sources, examining manipulation signals, and interpreting AI-related evidence without treating any single clue as proof.
Begin with the closest task, then follow related methods when one check is not enough.
The uncanny valley is a hypothesis about why a nearly human artificial character can feel less comfortable to watch than an obviously stylized one. Small mismatches in appearance or behavior may stand out when realism creates human expectations. That reaction can help describe your viewing experience, but it cannot establish whether a person or video […]
Image forensics examines a picture’s file structure, recorded history and visual content to investigate how it was made or changed. A useful examination combines several kinds of evidence, checks ordinary explanations for suspicious features and states what remains unknown. One missing metadata field, bright error map or detector score cannot answer every question about a […]
AI slop is a label for low-value digital content produced with generative AI, especially when it is created cheaply, repeated at scale, optimized for attention, and published with little original judgment or care. It can be a video, image, article, social post, fake historical scene, synthetic animal clip, automated list, or other media. The defining […]
Synthetic identity fraud is the use of a fabricated identity built from real, invented, or mixed personal information to commit fraud. Unlike traditional identity theft, the attacker is not always pretending to be one existing person. Instead, the fraud relies on an identity record that appears internally plausible even though the person represented by that […]
Reverse face search uses a face in a photo as the search query and looks for visually similar appearances of that face in an indexed collection of public web images. Unlike ordinary reverse image search, it is designed to find the same person across different photos, backgrounds, crops, lighting conditions, or camera angles rather than […]
AI ads are advertisements in which artificial intelligence materially creates, alters, or assembles part of the advertising creative. That can include generated images, synthetic video, AI actors, cloned or generated voices, virtual product scenes, translated speech, altered backgrounds, or automatically produced creative variations. Not every ad delivered by an AI-powered advertising system is an AI-generated […]
AI UGC is synthetic or AI-assisted content designed to look and feel like user-generated creator content. It often uses an AI avatar, generated voice, scripted testimonial, synthetic product demo, translated creator, or virtual presenter to reproduce the direct-to-camera style common in TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, product pages, and paid social ads. The name can […]
A deepfake romance scam uses AI-generated or AI-modified faces, voices, photos, video calls, or online identities to make a romantic relationship feel real enough to earn trust. The synthetic media is rarely the entire scam. It is usually one part of a longer relationship strategy that can end in requests for emergency money, gift cards, […]
InVID verification is a practical workflow for turning a video into searchable evidence. The InVID-WeVerify/VeraAI browser extension can extract representative keyframes from a video, send those frames to reverse image search engines, expose useful context and metadata, and help investigators trace footage back to earlier versions or a more credible source. The tool is especially […]
