Everyday & curiosity

Is This Image AI?

Open the picture at full size and tick every signal you can see. The score weights each tell by how rarely it appears in real photographs.

Signals present

Hands, fingers or teeth look wrongExtra or fused fingers, an odd thumb angle, teeth that merge — still the single strongest tell.
Text in the image is garbledSignage, labels and logos that dissolve into pseudo-letters at any zoom level.
Background objects melt or repeatCrowd faces, railings, window frames and tiles that lose structure away from the subject.
Skin and lighting are too evenPoreless skin, uniform soft light, no sensor noise anywhere in the frame.
Shadows or reflections disagreeTwo light directions in one scene, or a mirror that does not match what is in front of it.
Straps, glasses or jewellery break continuityA strap that vanishes behind a shoulder and reappears in the wrong place.
Paired items are mismatchedDifferent earrings, mismatched shoe patterns, asymmetric eyeglass frames.
No camera metadata (EXIF)Missing lens, exposure and timestamp data, or a generator tag such as C2PA content credentials.
No traceable original sourceReverse image search finds only recent reposts and no photographer or publication.

Likelihood it is AI-generated

Likely real

No strong generation artefacts. That is not proof: current models can pass every visual check.

Next steps

Reverse image search it (Google Lens, TinEye, Bing) and sort by oldest result.
Open the file's metadata — missing EXIF plus a C2PA tag is close to conclusive.
Zoom to 300% on hands, text, ears and jewellery, which is where generators still fail.
Ask the person who shared it for the original, uncropped file.

Why no detector is reliable on its own

Automated AI-image detectors report confident percentages, but they misfire on heavily edited photos, screenshots, compressed uploads and any model they were not trained on. Treat their output as one signal among several rather than a verdict.

Provenance beats forensics. A file that carries C2PA content credentials, intact camera metadata and a traceable original publication is far stronger evidence than any pixel analysis — and the absence of all three is the most useful warning sign you can get.