What CatfishTracker Actually Checks in Your Photo

1. Is the face real or AI-generated?

Try this: go to thispersondoesnotexist.com and keep refreshing the page. Every face you see is completely made up. None of those people exist. An AI called StyleGAN2 created all of them from scratch in milliseconds.

How does it work? Two AIs compete against each other. One invents fake faces, the other tries to catch them. They keep going until the fake faces are good enough to fool most people. Think of it like a forger and a detective: the forger keeps making fake paintings, the detective keeps trying to spot them, and after millions of rounds the forgeries look almost perfect. Almost. They still leave behind small mistakes that give them away.

AI-generated photos leave behind clues, but they are not always obvious and they change as the technology improves. Some things our AI looks for:

• ▸Skin that looks unnaturally smooth or perfect, with no texture or variation.
• ▸Backgrounds that look slightly off, blurred in an unnatural way, or inconsistent with the lighting on the face.
• ▸Small details like accessories, hair strands, or background objects that don't quite look right.
• ▸Lighting on the face that doesn't match the environment in the rest of the photo.
• ▸An overall quality that feels too polished or perfect to be a casual photo.

Newer AI tools are getting better every year and produce fewer obvious mistakes. No single clue is definitive on its own. CatfishTracker looks at the whole image together, not just one thing in isolation.

2. Has someone swapped a face onto another person's body?

A deepfake takes a real photo and replaces the face with a different person's face. The join between the new face and the original body usually shows up around the hairline, ears, and neck. The AI looks for these join marks, uneven skin tones where the two images meet, and edges that look slightly off.

3. Has a beauty app been used?

Apps like Facetune and FaceApp are very popular. They can make someone look dramatically different. The signs are skin that looks completely pore-free, eyes that seem unusually bright and large, and an overall smoothness that no phone camera actually produces. If these are present, the AI flags them.

4. Have facial features been reshaped?

Many editing apps let people slim their face, enlarge their eyes, or shrink their nose. These changes are subtle but they shift the natural proportions of a face. A photo can look completely normal to you and still have significant reshaping applied. The AI checks whether the face proportions look natural.

5. Has the skin been heavily smoothed?

Real skin has texture. Pores, fine lines, slight unevenness in colour. When heavy smoothing is applied, all of that disappears and gets replaced with a flat, airbrushed look. This is one of the most common edits on dating profiles and one of the most reliable things to check.

6. Has the background been changed or faked?

Some people replace their background to look like they are somewhere they are not. Others use AI to blur it in a way that looks unnatural around the hair or shoulders. The AI checks whether the background looks genuine or like it was swapped in.

7. Is this a stolen model or stock photo?

Some catfish skip AI entirely and just steal photos from models or Instagram influencers. These photos have a very distinct look: professional lighting, perfect angles, high-end retouching. They look like a photoshoot, not a selfie. The AI checks whether the photo has that polished, commercial quality.

8. Does the lighting make sense?

When a face is pasted into a background it was not originally photographed in, the lighting rarely matches. The shadows on the face might point the wrong way. The colour of the light might be different on the face versus the background. The AI looks for these mismatches as a sign the photo was assembled from more than one image.

What you get back

After all 8 checks, you get a score from 0 to 100. A score close to 100 means nothing suspicious was found. A score close to 0 means the photo has strong signs of manipulation. You also get a plain-English summary, a list of specific things that were flagged, and a suggestion for what to do next.