Two years ago, you could spot a fake video yourself. You would look for a face that flickered, lips drifting out of sync or a person that never blinked. Today’s AI video generation tools have fixed most of that. A convincing fake now takes minutes to make, and it’s being used in fraud, for fake evidence and scams aimed at members of finance teams.
Here’s what you can still check by eye, and information about why you need a detector.
Checks you can do yourself
Start with the source. Where did the video first appear? A clip with no original uploader, posted by a brand-new account, is something to be suspicious of.
Watch the edges of the face. Look at where the face meets the hair, ears or collar. Blurring, a soft halo or skin that seems to slide over the head can all indicate where a face has been swapped.
Examine the hands and teeth. AI still creates fingers that merge or bend wrongly, and generates teeth that look like one white block.
Check the light. Do the shadows on the face match the room? Do the reflections in glasses or eyes match?
Listen. Cloned voices can sound flat, with odd breathing or no background noise at all, as if recorded in a vacuum.
Search for key frames. Take a screenshot of a clear frame and run a reverse image search. Many fakes are built from real footage that you can find.
Why this isn’t enough any more
Every check above relies on the AI making a mistake. The newest tools make far fewer, and once a video has been compressed for social media or a messaging app, the small artefacts you’d look for are often wiped out. Spotting a good deepfake by eye often now comes down to luck.
How a deepfake detector works
A detector looks for the patterns AI leaves behind, rather than the visible mistakes. At AI Aware, we split a video into frames and check each one with models trained on large sets of real and AI-generated images. We check the audio track separately for signs of voice cloning. The result is a score showing how likely it is that the video was made or changed by AI.
On our latest held-out tests, our video and image detection is 99.4% accurate, and our audio detection is 97.6% accurate. We publish how we test, so you can see exactly what those numbers mean.
What to do with the result
Treat a high score as a strong reason to stop and check, not the end of the investigation. Combine it with the source checks above. If money, evidence or someone’s reputation is at stake, keep a record of the result alongside where the video came from.
If you have a video you're unsure about, you can check it with AI Aware's deepfake detector. Your first 3 checks are free, with no sign-up.
