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AI pictures

Was this picture made by AI? What its file says

Image generators often write into the picture what made it: the prompt, the settings, the model, or a signed record that says AI made it. You cannot see any of it in the picture. hexscope reads it from the file, in your browser, without uploading it.

Check a picture Try an AI picture

1 What an AI picture can carry

  • The prompt and settings. Stable Diffusion's web interfaces, such as AUTOMATIC1111 and Forge, write the prompt, the negative prompt, the steps, the seed and the model into a PNG's text notes. ComfyUI writes its whole workflow, the prompt in it; InvokeAI a record of its own.
  • Content Credentials (C2PA): a signed record of who or what made a picture and how it was edited. Adobe Firefly, OpenAI's image tools, Photoshop and some cameras write them. They can say a picture was made with generative AI, or partly made with it.
  • A digital source type in the picture's XMP: the same statement in plain metadata, as stock sites and editors write it.

2 Check a picture

Open the picture in hexscope. If it says what made it, the card at the top says so, and whether it carries the prompt. Metadata shows the details: for example “made with Stable Diffusion, model sdxl_base_1.0” and the prompt itself, or for Content Credentials the program that wrote them and whether they say AI made the picture. Bytes shows where each one is kept.

It reads PNG, JPEG and WebP, the formats image generators save in.

3 What it cannot tell you

  • No record does not mean no AI. Social networks and messaging apps strip metadata from the pictures they pass on, a screenshot has none, and anyone can remove it. Most AI pictures you meet online carry nothing.
  • A record is a claim. hexscope does not check the signature of Content Credentials: it says what the file claims, not that the claim is true.
  • It does not look at the pixels. Some generators hide a watermark in the picture itself, such as Google's SynthID; only their makers' tools read it.

If a picture says AI made it, that is strong evidence. If it says nothing, it tells you nothing either way.

4 Before you share your own

A picture you generated carries your prompt to whoever gets the file, and a prompt can say more than the picture: names, places, ideas you did not mean to share. The clean copy leaves out the text notes, EXIF, XMP and Content Credentials, and copies the picture itself byte for byte.

To be open that AI made a picture, say so where you post it.

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