I Thought AI Image Detection Needed a GPU Cluster. It Was Just Metadata

Two hours of my life spent assuming there was a GPU cluster somewhere running an image classifier.

There wasn’t.

It’s reading metadata. That’s it. And I shipped the same thing on forg.to in an afternoon with zero new dependencies and zero added cost.

Here’s the actual story.

Why forg.to needed this

forg.to is where indie hackers and builders share their product journey. Real wins, real losses, real progress.

As AI image generation got good, posts started showing up with suspiciously polished mockups. Nobody was lying. But context was missing. Was this a real screenshot or a Firefly render?

I wanted a small badge on AI-generated images. Hover over it, see which tool made it. Transparent, automatic, zero friction for the person posting.

Two hard constraints going in: the site stays fast, and this costs nothing. Those two constraints ruled out almost every obvious solution.

So I went digging into how...

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