The tenant’s move-out photos of the living-room carpet are spotless. Your inspection photos, taken two days later, show a burn mark the size of a coin beside the sofa. Both sets came off phones. Both look entirely real.
Usually the explanation is timing: someone photographed the carpet before the party, or after the cleaners had been. It still usually is. But there is now a second explanation that takes a few seconds, and it is built into the photo app on most phones.
The AI fraud to expect is an edit, not an invention
Most talk about AI and rental evidence imagines a tenant typing “water-damaged ceiling” into an image generator. That can happen, and it is the less likely case. A generated picture of a room has to match your unit’s layout, fixtures and paint, and it rarely does.
The easier move is to take a real photograph of the real room and remove one thing. Google’s Magic Eraser, Samsung’s Galaxy AI editing tools and Apple’s Clean Up all do exactly this: circle the stain, tap, and the phone paints carpet where the stain was. Google made Magic Eraser free to every Google Photos user in 2024. The result is a genuine photograph of the right room with one detail missing. It works the other way too: a contractor’s “after” photo with the debris still in the corner can be tidied in the same few seconds.
You will not catch that by looking. The tools are good at carpet.
What the phone writes down
The useful fact is that the companies building these tools mostly record, inside the file, that they were used.
- Google says photos edited with Magic Eraser, Magic Editor and Zoom Enhance carry metadata, based on the IPTC photo-metadata standard, saying generative AI was used. The Pixel 10 goes further: every photo from its camera app carries signed Content Credentials, and Google Photos adds Content Credentials to images edited with its AI tools.
- Samsung puts a visible Galaxy AI watermark on AI-generated images, and said at the Galaxy S25 launch that Content Credentials may also be applied to images edited with its generative tools.
- Apple writes a label into the photo’s metadata when Clean Up is used, and the Photos app shows “Modified with Clean Up”. (9to5Mac found the label in the iOS 18.1 beta.)
The IPTC standard has its own term for this: a picture changed “using a Generative AI model, such as with inpainting”. It is a different term from the one for a picture generated from nothing, and the difference matters in a dispute.
What the checker says
When that record survives and our checker can read it, you get something like:
AI Edited. The file’s own metadata says generative AI was used to alter or add to this picture. It does not record what was changed, and the rest may be a real photograph. Camera clock recorded 2026-08-02 14:11:09. Ask for the file as it was before editing.
Three things about that wording are deliberate.
- It says edited, not generated. The room is real. Calling the file “AI generated” would be wrong, and the first time a tenant produced the unedited original it would make every other line in your file look careless too.
- It does not say what was changed. The metadata records that an AI edit happened, not where. Someone may have removed a reflection, their own thumb, or a stain. The finding is a question, not an answer.
- It tells you what to ask for. Phone editors often keep the original. Samsung’s Gallery, for one, saves AI edits as a copy. If the edit was innocent, the unedited photo settles it in a minute.
Where the record does not survive
All of this lives in metadata, and metadata is fragile.
Send the edited photo through WhatsApp, Messenger or Facebook, or as a text message, or screenshot it, and the record is usually gone. 9to5Mac found that Apple’s Clean Up label survived AirDrop and iMessage but was removed when the photo went through WhatsApp or Telegram. What arrives then reads Can’t Verify, exactly like an unedited photo sent the same way. That is not evidence of an edit, and it is not evidence against one.
Samsung’s visible watermark does survive a screenshot, but it is a small mark in a corner, and a crop removes it.
So it comes back to the same one-sentence request:
Please send the original files from your phone as email attachments, not screenshots and not through a messaging app.
A tenant with nothing to hide can do that in two minutes. If the file that comes back says AI Edited, you have a specific, polite question to ask. We wrote about the rest of that exchange in checking the photos a tenant sends back.
Your own photos
The same rule binds you. If anyone on your team uses an AI eraser on an inspection photo, to take out a reflection in a window or a shadow on the floor, the file will say that AI altered it, and the other side is entitled to read that out. Keep inspection photos exactly as they came off the camera. If you need to crop or brighten one, do it to a copy.
What this does not do
It only sees edits the file declares. Older phones, many third-party apps and anyone with desktop software can alter a photo without writing anything down. No declaration is not proof of no edit.
It does not read Apple’s label yet, and iPhones save photos as HEIC by default, which our checker does not read yet either. It says “Not Read” rather than implying it looked. Ask whether they can send a JPEG.
We have tested this against files built to the published standard. We have not yet run a real edited file from every phone maker through it. If you have one, the original straight off the phone, we would like to see it: [email protected].
It does not give you a confidence score. We tried twice to build a classifier that judges a picture by its pixels. The second attempt looked at eighteen ordinary photographs and called seventeen of them fake. It is switched off. A tool that guesses whether carpet was painted in by AI will end up calling honest tenants liars.
Metadata can be edited. Someone who knows how can remove the AI-edit record. The checker reports what the file says. It is not a signature on the truth.
ImposterShield reads the evidence inside image files. It runs in your browser and uploads nothing. If a file has been stripped, it says so. That is the product working, not failing.
Check a tenant’s photo right now
Drop the last move-out photo a tenant sent you on the page. You will see whether it came off a camera, whether the file says AI touched it, or whether the evidence was stripped on the way to you. Free, and nothing is uploaded.
Open the checker