Can you spot AI-generated images?
Last updated: July 2026
Eight images. Some are real photographs, some came out of an image generator. Look closely before you commit. The obvious tells are mostly gone from modern models, but they still slip up in ways you can learn to catch.
Where to actually look
The famous giveaways, six fingers and melted text, are mostly fixed in current models. What remains is subtler. Look at the places where things meet: hair against a background, glasses against a face, a hand holding an object. Check text in the background of a scene, not the foreground. Look for surfaces that are a little too clean, lighting that comes from nowhere in particular, and repeating patterns like bricks, crowds, or fences that don't quite repeat correctly.
Above all, ask where the image came from. Provenance beats pixel-peeping every time. A photo with no source, appearing first on social media at a convenient moment, deserves suspicion no matter how real it looks. For the full breakdown, read our guide on how to tell if an image is AI-generated, and if you want to understand why these glitches happen at all, see how AI image generators work.
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