As tech companies continue to invest unprecedented amounts of resources and money in building the latest AI models, one aspect is generally neglected: creating tools that can detect AI imagery.
In a world where anyone, including the President of the United States, can falsely accuse a piece of media as being AI, deepfake detectors are badly needed to stem the tide of misinformation.
Step forward Nvidia, a chip-maker that has so far benefited the most from AI. At SIGGRAPH 2026, a computer graphics conference held in Los Angeles, Nvidia unveiled Synthetic Video Detector, an AI-powered verification tool that reportedly detects AI videos accurately and rapidly.
“The service analyzes video frames and extracts frequency-domain statistical patterns that are indicative of diffusion-based generation,” Nvidia says. “It is designed to be robust to common video compression artifacts, ensuring reliable performance across real-world video inputs.”
As Tom’s Hardware notes, it detects fake videos by cropping frames down to 504×504 pixels. The frames are then passed to two Vision Transformers, which analyze and rank them from 0 to 1 — 0 indicates a real frame and 1 indicates a fake frame. The scores of all the frames are then averaged out to give a percentage score out of 100.
On a high-resolution 1080p video, Nvidia says that Synthetic Video Detector (SVD) can achieve a 92% accuracy. It can also process an uncompressed video in as little as 22 milliseconds on Nvidia RTX systems, a specialized visual computing and graphics card.
However, most videos on the internet are compressed, which means frames lose artifacts that SVD uses to find out whether it’s real or AI-generated. So for videos compressed by 15%, the detection accuracy falls to 87%, falling to 82% when the video has been compressed by 50%.
Nvidia is pitching SVD as a microservice to be used by newsrooms in editorial and media workflows.
“Rather than replacing established verification practices, the microservice provides another signal for time-sensitive decisions — helping teams move quickly while protecting editorial standards and ensuring public trust,” Nvidia says.
SVD is part of Nvidia’s AI for Media Private Access Program, meaning it is not available to the public. Although there is a demo version available online that people can try.
Image creditsHeader photo licensed via Depositphotos.