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 credits Header photo licensed via Depositphotos .