Real or AI?
How to spot an AI image
No single check is reliable, and the better generators get, the fewer of these hold. But they are still where most AI images give themselves away.
Hands, teeth and ears
Generators still miscount fingers, merge teeth and draw ears that don't match each other.
Writing
Signs, labels and book spines that look like text from a distance but don't spell anything.
Things that should repeat
Window grids, fence posts, tiles and chain links drift, change size or melt into each other.
Light that disagrees
Shadows pointing different ways, reflections showing a different scene, highlights with no source.
Too clean
Real places have dust, wear, clutter and bad framing. A suspiciously perfect plate of food is a tell.
The background
Generators spend their detail on the subject. Look at the edges: smeared objects, people with no faces, buildings that dissolve.
Questions
- Where do the real photos come from?
- Wikimedia Commons, from its Quality, Featured and Valued image collections. We only use files uploaded before 2021, before AI image generators went mainstream, so a "real" photo here cannot be an AI image someone uploaded as a photograph. Each photographer is credited after you answer.
- Where do the AI images come from?
- DiffusionDB, a public research library of images made with Stable Diffusion and released into the public domain. After you answer you can see the exact prompt that produced each one.
- When is there a new puzzle?
- Every day at midnight, your local time. Everyone playing on the same date gets the same ten pictures.
- Is anything about me stored?
- Your answers and streak are kept in your own browser. When you finish, we record only which rounds were right or wrong, for the "% of players got this one" figure, with no account and nothing that identifies you.
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