Definition
Plain language
Faking a photo by duplicating a piece of it and pasting the copy somewhere else in the same image.
As stated in the literature
A classic image-tampering pattern in which a region is cloned within one image; detectors look for duplicated blocks and inconsistent local noise or compression statistics, signals that diffusion-based re-rendering does not leave behind.
Also called: copy-move forgery
Why it matters: It is one of the classic fakery patterns that forensic tools are built to catch, which is exactly why newer AI-based edits that leave no duplicated patches slip past those tools.
For example, someone hides a gap in a crowd photo by cloning a patch of nearby people and pasting it over the empty spot.
Heard on the show
“TruFor was built to catch splicing and copy-move: chunks of one photo pasted into another, mismatched noise, and inconsistent compression.”Episode 247 — One Edited Photo, an Honest Caption, and a RAG System That Believes It