Are Detectors Fair to Indian IP-AIGC? A Cross-Generator Study

Modern image editors can produce identity-preserving AIGC (IP-AIGC), where the same person appears with new attire, background, or lighting. The robustness and fairness of current detectors in this regime remain unclear, especially for under-represented populations. We present what we believe is the first systematic study of IP-AIGC detection for Indian and South-Asian faces, quantifying cross-generator generalization and intra-population performance. We assemble Indian-focused training splits from FairFD and HAV-DF, and construct two held-out IP-AIGC test sets (HIDF-img-ip-genai and HIDF-vid-ip-genai) using commercial web-UI generators (Gemini and ChatGPT) with identity-preserving prompts. We evaluate two state-of-the-art detectors (AIDE and Effort) under pretrained (PT) and fine-tuned (FT) regimes and report AUC, AP, EER, and accuracy. Fine-tuning yields strong in-domain gains (for example, Effort AUC 0.739 to 0.944 on HAV-DF-test; AIDE EER 0.484 to 0.259), but consistently degrades performance on held-out IP-AIGC for Indian cohorts (for example, AIDE AUC 0.923 to 0.563 on HIDF-img-ip-genai; Effort 0.740 to 0.533), which indicates overfitting to training-generator cues. On non-IP HIDF images, PT performance remains high, which suggests a specific brittleness to identity-preserving edits rather than a generic distribution shift. Our study establishes IP-AIGC-Indian as a challenging and practically relevant scenario and motivates representation-preserving adaptation and India-aware benchmark curation to close generalization gaps in AIGC detection.