Guide · 3 Oct 2026

How to tell if an image is AI-made: 8 clues to check

You saw a photo that looks almost too perfect and something in you hesitated. That instinct is worth trusting — but it needs evidence. These are the eight clues professional reviewers and detection tools look for, written so you can check them yourself, on your phone, without installing anything.

1. 1

   Hands, teeth and ears

   Generators still fumble small body parts. Count the fingers, look at where a thumb bends, check teeth for even spacing and ears for matching shapes. One wrong finger on a hand holding a cup is weak proof on its own — but three odd hands in one photo is a strong signal.

2. 2

   Text inside the picture

   Street signs, shop fronts, labels on bottles, letters on a jersey. AI-generated text often looks right at a glance and falls apart when you read it closely: doubled letters, strokes that trail off, words that are almost but not quite real. Zoom in before you trust a caption.

3. 3

   Reflections that disagree

   A reflection in a window, a mirror or water has to match the thing it reflects, and the light source has to be consistent everywhere in the frame. Check whether the reflected scene is plausible and whether shadows point the same way. Fakes often get the physics of light subtly wrong.

4. 4

   Skin and surfaces that are too clean

   Faces rendered by AI often have an even, waxy smoothness with pores missing, while hair strands blur together. Materials can look airbrushed across the whole photo. This clue is easy to over-read — beauty filters do it too — so use it to raise your suspicion, not to settle it.

5. 5

   Edges where things melt together

   Look where objects meet: a hand and a railing, hair and a background, glasses and a nose. Generated images merge shapes there. Jewelry that blends into skin, a strap that becomes a shadow, sunglasses that grow out of a forehead — these seams are where fakes give themselves away.

6. 6

   A background that never resolves

   Zoom into the crowd, the skyline, the shelf behind the subject. If people in the back have smeared faces, buildings repeat, or patterns never quite settle into detail, the image may have been invented around a sharp foreground.

7. 7

   Missing file data

   Photos from a real camera carry hidden data: capture time, device model, and increasingly content credentials that say where a file came from. Two caveats: social apps strip most of it on upload, and it proves nothing when present on a screenshot of a fake. It is one clue among several, not a verdict.

8. 8

   The story around the picture

   Ask the boring questions. Who first posted this, and can that account be traced? Does a reverse-image search find it somewhere older, with a different caption? Is the moment captured exactly the one everyone wishes were true? Too-perfect timing is itself a clue.

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