A few seconds of AI-generated video can now pass for a real recording, especially at phone size on a social feed. That clip of a storm, a celebrity or a "caught on camera" moment deserves the same questions you'd ask of a photo, plus a few that only apply to video.
1. Find the original upload
Reposted clips are cropped, re-encoded and stripped along the way. Look for the earliest copy you can find, and if you can, get the file itself rather than a screen recording of it.
2. Watch for what AI video still gets wrong
Play it at full size and slow it down if you can:
- Physics. Objects that pass through each other, liquids that pour oddly, people whose weight never quite lands.
- Continuity. Earrings, buttons, signs and background details that change or vanish between shots.
- Hands, teeth and text. Still the most common giveaways.
- Motion that is too smooth. Real handheld footage shakes, focuses and adjusts exposure.
3. Check what the file says about itself
A phone recording normally carries the device, the app, the creation date and sometimes the location. A generated clip starts without them, although a re-encoded real clip can lose them too, so treat missing details as a weak signal and contradictory ones as a strong one.
4. Run a check
Upload the video to snapWONDERS. Alongside the device and date details, the report samples frames across the clip and runs an AI-generation check on them, including how the motion compares with real camera recordings, and shows how confident that result is.
A worked example: the same tram, two phones
We recorded trams at the same Melbourne stop a few moments apart, once on an Android phone and once on an iPhone (shared to us through Google Drive), and checked both clips.
Both read "likely authentic", at 15%. That means nothing in the sampled frames looked generated. It is not a certificate that a clip is real; it is one piece of evidence.
Both real clips still graded Authenticity C ("moderate risk"). The reason is worth knowing:
The check samples 25 frames across the clip. These are steady shots seven or eight seconds long, so frames sampled a fraction of a second apart look almost identical, which is exactly what the check looks for when a clip has been padded with copied frames. The Android clip also flagged one sudden jump between two frames. Neither is a sign of AI. Short, steady footage gives these checks less to work with, which is why it pays to read the findings rather than stop at the letter.
Reading the result honestly
- "Likely authentic" is not "proven real". It means nothing in the sampled frames looked generated.
- Short, low-resolution clips give a check less to work with. Say so if that's what you have.
- Context still matters most. Who posted it first, when, and does anyone else have footage of the same event?
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