Deepfake Media Generation and Detection in the Generative AI Era: A Survey and Outlook

Recent advances in video generation models have significantly intensified the deepfake threat, yet the current deepfake video detection benchmarks remain underdeveloped. In particular, the effectiveness of image-level detectors in the video domain has not been systematically assessed. To fill this gap, we present FakeI2V-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating state-of-the-art video-level deepfake detectors in challenging scenarios, with a particular focus on systematically assessing the performance of image-level deepfake detectors in the video domain. FakeI2V-Bench comprises 97,548 videos, containing content generated by the latest powerful generation models and covering a broader range of categories. Using this dataset, we conduct a systematic evaluation of eight video-level detectors and twelve representative image-level detectors. Experimental results show that the best-performing image-level detector achieves an 80.16% AUC, slightly outperforming the strongest video-level detector (i.e., 79.99% AUC). Going beyond benchmarking, we present IV-Bridge, a general framework that enhances the applicability of image-level deepfake detectors to videos. IV-Bridge employs a random forest model with statistical features to aggregate frame-level predictions, allowing eleven image-level detectors to surpass state-of-the-art video-level approaches, with the best-performing variant achieving a 93.80% AUC. Overall, FakeI2V-Bench establishes a rigorous benchmark for deepfake video detection and introduces a novel pathway for extending image-level detectors to the video domain, offering new insights and directions for future research. Code and data are available at https://github.com/CryptoAILab/FakeI2V-Bench.

The rapid advancement of generative models has blurred the boundary between synthetic and real imagery, creating an urgent need for reliable deepfake detection. Yet most existing approaches rely on massive real--fake datasets, which are increasingly difficult to maintain as new generators continue to emerge. In this work, we investigate how much information about image authenticity is already encoded in modern multimodal vision representations. We find that frozen multimodal encoders naturally separate real and synthetic images in their embedding space, enabling a simple linear classifier to achieve strong performance without task-specific fine-tuning. Motivated by this observation, we develop a representation-aware data curation strategy that selects a compact set of representative generators for training. The resulting training set contains only 10K images, compared to 288K in AIGIBench and 4M in OpenFake, while improving robustness to unseen generators and distribution shifts. We additionally introduce RealWorldBench, a benchmark consisting of modern camera photographs, contemporary stock images, and outputs from recent commercial generators. Experiments across multiple benchmarks show that combining frozen multimodal representations with carefully curated training data provides a simple and effective approach to AI-generated image detection.

Deepfake detectors that achieve near-perfect scores on academic benchmarks collapse on real-world content: recent in-the-wild evaluations report AUC drops of 45-50% for state-of-the-art open-source models. We argue this gap is structural: static detectors are trained once against a moving generative frontier. We present BitMind Forensics (BMF), trained through Bittensor SN34, an open adversarial competition that continually refreshes the training distribution. We evaluate one dated export comprising image, general-video, and human-video checkpoints across nineteen public datasets: the canonical face-swap suites (FaceForensics++, Celeb-DF v1/v2/++, DFDC, DFD, UADFV, DF40) and recent in-the-wild and AI-generated-media benchmarks (Sumsub, Deepfake-Eval-2024, WildRF, Community Forensics, AIGCDetectBench, GenImage, AI-GenBench, AIGIBench, RAID, GenVidBench, GenVideo-100K). BMF reaches 0.936 AUC on Sumsub's original images and 0.872 pooled AUC over its full four-condition manipulation battery (1.4M images), staying robust under perturbation (0.855 JPEG, 0.799 downscaled), while GPEN enhancement improves detection (0.996). On Deepfake-Eval-2024, it matches the best commercial detector on images (0.915 vs 0.90) and exceeds it on video (0.822 vs 0.79), far above the best open-source detectors (0.56 and 0.63). It reaches 0.991 AUC on a 21-generator AI-image panel and 0.918 on GenVidBench, and exceeds the FF++-trained frontier on DFDC (0.947 vs 0.843) and Celeb-DF v2 (0.9985 vs 0.956), both contamination-audited, with statistical parity on Celeb-DF++. In a temporal study, successive dated exports improve on held-out media from generators absent from the static baseline's training (image 0.842 to 0.902; video 0.864 to 0.936). Our evaluation harness is public, and at publication the production API serves the exact evaluated snapshot for independent verification.