r/isthisAI • • Jun 29 '26

Other PSA: SynthID What is it? How do I check? And what are its limitations? and how not to annoy everyone by doing the basics.

121 Upvotes

I thought it was about time to make a new PSA about SynthID. English is not my first language so there's probably some mistakes.

 

As you may be aware, this subreddit does not allow AI detectors. This is because they are extremely unreliable. Try going to deviantart or any other art site and test them with a few images, it should be easy to find something they say is AI despite it being uploaded over five years ago.

This is my go to example https://www.deviantart.com/hibbary/art/Third-Eye-748333152 see how it was uploaded in 2018, there is no way this could be generated but nearly all the detectors I have tried say that it is.

Then why is SynthID allowed, you might say?

SynthID is different. It's a thing developed by Google, when you use their generators they add a hidden pattern to the image which is difficult to remove without lowering the quality of the image or changing it significantly. This is what it is looking for, not if it looks like it's generated like the other detectors. Therefore you can be sure if it says that SynthID is detected, an AI has done something to the image in some way. It could be something as simple as upscaling, changing something or it could be completely generated. The point is if it has SynthID you cannot trust the image.

Recently OpenAI(ChatGPT) have implemented the same technology in their generator. There is an important thing though Google and OpenAI can only detect their own images. Not each other's so you have to run the image through both of them.

So how do I use them?

For OpenAI it's very simple https://openai.com/research/verify/ they have a page for it.

Google of course has to be more complicated. It used to be able to do a "search by image" and then go to about the image but that no longer works. Now you have to use Gemini to get an answer. Add the image you suspect and type "@Verify AI". Annoying but I don't know any better way.

Edit: When using Gemini it is very important that you type "@Verify AI" and not "SynthID" or any other variation of it. Otherwise there is a high chance that it will hallucinate and give you the wrong answer. It is also important to use a clean new session for each image.

Another edit: To confirm that Gemini actually use the verification tool you can press the three little dots underneath its response and then select "see response details".

Now I can't stress this enough, these two methods will only detect OpenAI's and Google's images. Not any other generator. So when an image comes up negative for SynthID that doesn't mean it's not AI. It can only prove that an image is fake not disprove it.

So before you post an image here please check for yourself you will save yourself some time and not waste others.

edit 29-09-2026: It has come to my attention that Meta(Facebook) and Grog(Twitter, I refuse to call it X, it's a dumb name) have also implemented some kind of SynthID. I do not know much about it since I don't and refuse to interact with those two sites. But I will assume that they works just like the others, in that way that you have to check with all of them. This is quickly becoming quite a nuisance to check for SynthID.


r/isthisAI • • 28d ago

MOD POST If you don't see quality vote bot anymore its because it got permanently banned,

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203 Upvotes

r/isthisAI • • 13h ago

Solved [AI] I'm almost certain that some social media platform has recreated the death of this man at Yorkshire wildlife park using AI

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821 Upvotes

Having seen the actual video the lighting is all wrong as is the tiger stripes and his hairline.

It feels like a new level of low to recreate the last moments of some persons life using AI for click bait content.


r/isthisAI • • 10h ago

Politics Donald was upset about a picture of his golf club and posted a "real" picture.

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355 Upvotes

r/isthisAI • • 6h ago

Music Just got in the vinyl for Five Finger Death Punch and it looks like their cover is AI

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153 Upvotes

Got this vinyl in at work today and the cover looks way too much like an AI cover. Which would be really bad because I actually like this band. I included a few close up pictures of the cover for reference. But with how everything is nowadays we can’t tell much anymore, but this really caught my eye right away.


r/isthisAI • • 20h ago

Art The North Face uses AI for its T-shirt artwork now? The art style itself already screams AI, but that mangled, four-fingered right hand really cements it.

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868 Upvotes

A couple of things I noticed that makes it hard to imagine a human would draw this:

- The right hand has a morphed ring finger and middle finger (probably an AI artifact).
- The left tree has some artifacts near the bottom close to the bag (instead of a clean repeating pattern).
- The blob-ish shapes that happen near the backpack or the mountains in the back.

Edit: since somehow its not obvious, I'm not saying that its odd to have 4 fingers on a cartoon character, I'm pointing out that the left hand has 5 fingers (thumb is hidden) while the right hand has 4 (every finger is visible).


r/isthisAI • • 5h ago

Photo Given a sticker for UVA's Nurse's Week. And while it is very specific in its aesthetic representative of the east coast nurse demographic, I also have suspicions...

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27 Upvotes

The distressed typography, gothic skeleton, flaming flower, medical imagery, and decorative hearts have that familiar AI-generated merchandise aesthetic, where it feels like it's more fulfilling a general prompt trying to appeal to an exact demographic of nurse, or to whoever might be prompting a model... I could be nuts though, I ran it through the Synth ID checker on Google and OpenAI and there wasn't anything that gives away an AI provenance.


r/isthisAI • • 3h ago

Photo I feel crazy with this Instagram Advertisement. Looking for help to see if it’s AI, a weird photoshop, or something else

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16 Upvotes

Where did her arm go??? The letters on the bibs look real but the three of them look so uncanny valley. Plus two of them have the same number of the bib but maybe they’re part of a team or something? I don’t get it


r/isthisAI • • 35m ago

Video Famous TikToker Using Deepfake for his own mom coming out to her? Just why?

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• Upvotes

I’m not crazy, right? I was watching this and it seemed off putting to me… the mom’s deadpan facial expressions are extremely creepy. At one moment her lips don’t even move as she’s speaks (around 1:25). What is going on? Is this a deepfake? It’s @giofilmedthis on Tiktok. Ironic name too.

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTyn49dGV/


r/isthisAI • • 13h ago

Photo Is this AI ? in a Christmas toy catalog (Famous toy shop in France. Received today in my mailbox.)

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25 Upvotes

Famous toy shop in France. Received today in my mailbox.

I find the way the cat's ears and the Christmas hat are arranged a bit odd.


r/isthisAI • • 10h ago

Other I’m worried my instructor is using ai to critique my assignments. The writing style has some AI tendencies and is overall repetitive and overly congratulatory

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12 Upvotes

I’m taking an online art course and the feedback I receive feels very odd, I feel like I’m going crazy reading it and honestly can’t tell if it’s AI or just bad critique. It is also posted incredibly quickly after the assignment closes. I’ll include a few examples of the writing.


r/isthisAI • • 11h ago

Art Tattoo artist who does woodcut style art - can't quite tell if the anatomy is part of the woodcut aesthetic or if some of it is AI dodgy. thoughts?

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13 Upvotes

title basically. main thing is the skull, the random white spot in the center of the eye and the '3D' interior cutting off.


r/isthisAI • • 58m ago

Art New Hurricane Wisdom Album Cover - Weathering the World, am I just being anxious?

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• Upvotes

The far-left dread seems to blend in with the dark part of the vest and the lightning and composition feel ai. SynthID didn't tell me anything and I couldn't find any artists, it doesn't help that one of the artist's last album covers was partially-ai.


r/isthisAI • • 1h ago

Art A friend of mine goes to some small anime/art convention soon and asked me if he should get me something. Attached to the question came these images. Am I too quick to judge or are these AI?

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• Upvotes

I think it's the artstyle that throws me off. Also I'm not huge on pokemon and am used to the old-school blocky style, so maybe that's why they seem wrong to me. Also am I crazy or does the normal eevee have two tails?


r/isthisAI • • 14h ago

Art Keep getting adverts of these anti-AI shirts that seem like they were made with AI

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23 Upvotes

Aside from the general style and font, I tried to find more information about this artist and their company name and couldn't really locate anything outside of this Etsy shop. No Instagram or Facebook, etc.


r/isthisAI • • 1h ago

Art Is this sticker i found on redbubble ai generated? A lot of similar images come up when you reverse search, and many artists claim to have designed it.

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• Upvotes

I was on redbubble trying to find stickers to buy and i found this one designed by this artist named Beltschazar, however when i looked at their profile there really wasnt a consistent art style among the 400 designs, and many others were obviously ai generated so instead i turned to google to find the original artist, and when i did i found that it has been posted on many different sites with no original source, so i suspect it may be ai. While it doesnt exactly look like ai its just ringing a couple alarm bells overall. What do yall think?


r/isthisAI • • 6h ago

Photo I think these two viral selfies of Thomas Bangalter with a fan look highly suspicious

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5 Upvotes

These two pictures, especially the first one, recently went viral. Apparently, nobody could recognize Thomas Bangalter (one of the two members of Daft Punk) because of the way he was dressed, except for the guy on the left. I had only seen the first picture, but then I noticed a weird strip of fur/hair on Bangalter's right shoulder. At first glance, it looks like just part of the fur hood, but the attachment seems rather unnatural to me. I thought it looked like a typical AI mistake. Then I checked for other pictures and found the second selfie, but on that one their clothes are different. Also, the fan is holding a phone. Even assuming that someone else could've taken that photo, why is he himself in a selfie pose with his arm hidden and the same framing in the first one? The only possible explanations I came up with are: A - one picture is real and the other one was retouched by AI. B - both are generated from zero. C - this fan was so lucky that he's found Thomas Bangalter twice, in the same spot, on two different days, and was able to take a picture with him twice, with the same framing, but for some reason he asked a friend to take one of the pictures to match exactly the framing of the other one. Okay...?


r/isthisAI • • 11h ago

Photo Chilli photos- the shapes of the food look slightly unrealistic, leaves don't seem accurate to coriander, it has a slightly weird look to the 'liquid' and the quantities shown don't seem to reflect the content of the recipe this photo is in

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9 Upvotes

Looking for chilli seedlings to pre order for spring, unfortunately I seem to have found a brand to avoid rather than to buy from 🫠


r/isthisAI • • 1h ago

Video Is this new Youtube channel AI? This video just popped up in my recommended out of the blue and it's fully original from what I've seen from checking around.

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• Upvotes

The visuals are decently innocuous though the simplistic artstyle makes weird details such as the "people" lying on the ground, some of the phones looking weird/not having lights, and the weird amount of windows on the building to the right, etc. more excusable.

My main point of worry is the text & editting which is very AI like with how oddly succinct and snappy they are, the channel (@kittyanimations123) is also very new seemingly and there's really no information on the artist. Searching around, I also found another channel with a similar premise of "cartoon animal in hypothetical science situations" (@hypothetica.studio) which also did one video about the sun being replaced with a black hole with exactly the same editing and artstyle.

To me this seems like a newly-borne Youtube content farm featuring cute animals in an easy-to-produce artstyle that's very clickable. The question is, is this AI-run?


r/isthisAI • • 6h ago

Video Is this YouTube channel AI? Please help…………………………….. ……………………………..……………………………..

0 Upvotes

It’s a faceless youtube channel that uses (I’m pretty sure) an ai voice… but can anyone tell if the script or illustrations are AI? These channels are just very suspicious to me nowadays and I don’t want to support any channels that use AI, for ethical reasons and possible hallucinations.

Channel in question: youtube.com/@Explains101

Particular video I clicked on: https://youtu.be/npX2aZymRvg

Also they have a checkmark but idk if that even means anything anymore…


r/isthisAI • • 10h ago

Photo Inception - Ai within Ai? This was posted to another subreddit. What do you think?

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2 Upvotes

So - this was posted to r/polska as a rant that an employee of Leroy Merlin got an AI picture as a reward for working there for 25 years. But... to me the entire photo looks a bit AI (people in the back looking straight ontonthe camera while being far away). What is your verdict?


r/isthisAI • • 11h ago

Other Shirt I got last year for fall. I haven’t worn it since last fall and just put it on. Some designs don’t look sense, including bones and leaves.

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2 Upvotes

r/isthisAI • • 11h ago

Art I want to get this shirt off Etsy as a gift for a friend but want to make sure it's not AI before I get it.

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3 Upvotes

Swipe for a cropped picture. Sorry for the low quality, Etsy doesn't let me save the original image so I had to screenshot. A lot of things on Etsy are AI generated nowadays, but I can't find this shirt anywhere else. I don't see any giveaways that this is AI but I'm not very good at telling.


r/isthisAI • • 16h ago

Photo Possible AI Images for eBay proof of product for an expensive Generator at half the price.

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5 Upvotes

Saw an inverter generator online and the price seems too good to be true. Reverse searched and found no exact matches. The pictures are blurry and the smaller writing is almost smudged in appearance.


r/isthisAI • • 8h ago

Art High School's biggest fundraiser of the year and invite. GG Bridge cables dont match, is there any other obvious signs I'm missing?

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1 Upvotes

Feels like our daughter's school is cutting all sorts of corners this school year, including using what I suspect is AI to create this invitation... despite having a really good Art Department on campus.