You Don't Need a Neural Network to Spot a Deepfake

Most detection pipelines today are black boxes — a neural network says "fake" and you just trust it. I wanted to see how far pure statistics could go. No deep learning. Just handcrafted image features and a logistic regression. The results were better than I expected. The setup Dataset: CIFAKE — ~60,000 images (real photos vs. AI-generated) Approach: Extract statistical features from each image, evaluate with two metrics: Covariance difference (Frobenius norm) — how different are the real vs. fa