# AI-generated Images Challenge Visual Trust in High-risk Scenarios

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22745 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22745/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [CNN-generated images are surprisingly easy to spot... for now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11035/) (2019)
- [Vector Quantized Diffusion Model for Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14822/) (2021)
- [Leveraging Frequency Analysis for Deep Fake Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08685/) (2020)
- [Towards Universal Fake Image Detectors that Generalize Across Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10174/) (2023)
- [DIRE for Diffusion-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09295/) (2023)
- [GenImage: A Million-Scale Benchmark for Detecting AI-Generated Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08571/) (2023)
- [A Sanity Check for AI-generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19435/) (2024)
- [DE-FAKE: Detection and Attribution of Fake Images Generated by Text-to-Image Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06998/) (2022)
- [PatchCraft: Exploring Texture Patch for Efficient AI-generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12397/) (2023)
- [GPT-ImgEval: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Diagnosing GPT4o in Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02782/) (2025)
- [Community Forensics: Using Thousands of Generators to Train Fake Image Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04125/) (2024)
- [Spatial Dual-Modality Graph Reasoning for Key Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14470/) (2021)
- [An Empirical Study of GPT-4o Image Generation Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05979/) (2025)
- [MEDIC: A Multi-Task Learning Dataset for Disaster Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12828/) (2021)
- [GIM: A Million-scale Benchmark for Generative Image Manipulation Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16531/) (2024)
- [ThinkFake: Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models for AI-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19841/) (2025)
- [AnimeDL-2M: Million-Scale AI-Generated Anime Image Detection and Localization in Diffusion Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11015/) (2025)
- [SciFigDetect: A Benchmark for AI-Generated Scientific Figure Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08211/) (2026)
- [Detecting AI-generated Artwork](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07078/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [From Learner Behavior to Reusable Skills for Effective and Efficient Learner Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37157/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Rapid advances in image generation are eroding the evidentiary value of visual content in settings where authenticity can affect public safety and personal reputation. Yet existing detection benchmarks rarely examine synthetic images in public- and individual-safety contexts, where misleading visual content may carry substantial risks. Here we introduce SafeIMG, a safety-oriented benchmark spanning 12 public- and individual-safety scenarios generated using GPT Image 2. Unlike benchmarks centred on generic imagery and image-level labels, SafeIMG evaluates not only whether detectors recognise synthetic images, but also whether their decisions reflect human-identified anomalies. To this end, SafeIMG provides human annotations that localise suspicious regions and explain local artefacts and higher-level commonsense or physical inconsistencies. We evaluate specialized synthetic-image detectors and vision-language models (VLMs), and find that neither provides reliable detection. The strongest VLM identifies only 49.5% of generated images, whereas the best specialised detector identifies 33.1%, compared with 81.7% accuracy for human evaluators. Model explanations cover only 29.8% of human-annotated anomalies and predominantly capture local defects in text, faces and hands. Their coverage falls to 15.0% for commonsense conflicts and 12.0% for physical inconsistencies, while detection performance deteriorates further after dissemination-induced image degradation. These findings show that current detectors lack the accuracy, explanatory alignment and robustness needed to evaluate AI-generated images reliably across public- and individual-safety settings.