AI-generated photos are everywhere now, in ads, dating profiles, marketplace listings, news feeds and scams. A year ago you could spot them by the hands. Today you usually can't.
I wanted a fast, private way to get a second opinion on a photo before trusting it. So I built one.
THE PROBLEM
There's no single tell for an AI image. Some carry signed provenance, some were made by models that leave none, and plenty have had every trace stripped before they reach you. Any honest answer has to weigh several weak signals, not lean on one.
WHAT IT DOES
Drop an image and Trueframe returns a plain-language verdict — real, inconclusive, or likely AI, with a per-signal breakdown of why. No upload, no account; the whole thing runs in your browser.
HOW IT WORKS
It gathers evidence and weighs it. Signed C2PA provenance and an in-browser neural pixel detector are the strong signals; EXIF authenticity and durable-watermark hints corroborate; a sensor-noise heuristic adds context (real cameras leave more grain than AI). The pixel detector reads the image itself, so it can still flag AI even after metadata is stripped.
WHAT IT CAN'T DO
Trueframe is a heuristic estimate, not a calibrated detector or legal proof. It's tuned for photorealistic images, purely synthetic graphics like logos, 3D renders and diagrams can read as "real." Heavy re-encoding erodes the pixel signal. Treat the verdict as a signal, not a sentence.
WHERE IT FITS
The big labs are solving this from the inside. Google DeepMind's SynthID embeds invisible watermarks in content from Google's models, detectable via Gemini or its SynthID Detector. OpenAI's Verify checks whether an image came from its tools by reading C2PA credentials and SynthID watermarks. Both are excellent and both are first-party: they're authoritative for content their own systems marked. Trueframe covers the rest, a model-agnostic, private second opinion that still says something when there's no watermark at all, at the cost of being an estimate rather than proof.
Trueframe is live at trueframe.uxtim.com.
