ImageGuesser
The Detection Log

Latest from the Lab

Deep dives into AI technology, educational guides, and community updates.

Ethics6 min readJanuary 5, 2026

The Liar's Dividend: What Fake Images Actually Broke

The pope in a puffer jacket was funny. The fake Pentagon explosion moved markets. The deeper damage isn't that fakes get believed — it's that real evidence becomes deniable.

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Advanced6 min readDecember 22, 2025

Verifying a Viral Image in 2026: Provenance, Watermarks, and What Actually Works

EXIF is stripped, ELA misleads, and AI detectors guess. A realistic verification workflow for the provenance era — Content Credentials, SynthID, reverse image search, and the single-source rule.

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Detection Guide6 min readDecember 15, 2025

The 30-Second Physics Audit: A Repeatable Method for Checking Any Image

Anatomy tells fade with every model release, but physics errors persist. A step-by-step audit — light, shadows, reflections, geometry, text — you can run on any suspicious image in half a minute.

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Detection Guide5 min readDecember 8, 2025

The Hand Problem Is Dying. Here Is What Replaces It.

For years, counting fingers was the go-to AI detection trick. Modern models have largely fixed hands — so relying on them now gets you fooled. Here are the anatomical tells that still work in 2026.

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Fundamentals5 min readDecember 1, 2025

What Generating Thousands of Fake Images Taught Me About Diffusion Models

I generate AI images every day to build ImageGuesser puzzles. Here is what the diffusion process actually looks like from the operator's chair — and why its failures cluster exactly where they do.

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