How to Tell If a Photo Is AI Generated
Most guides to this are two years out of date, and the free "AI detector" tools are less trustworthy than they look. Here is the honest version — including the point at which you should stop examining the picture and ask a different question entirely.
Can you tell just by looking?
Sometimes. Much less often than you could a year ago.
The famous advice — count the fingers — worked briefly and then stopped working, for a predictable reason: the faults everyone learned to look for were the first ones the companies fixed. Hands were an embarrassment, so hands got attention. Guides that still lead with extra fingers are describing the tools of 2023.
What remains true is that sloppy fakes are still spottable and careful ones often are not. Most of what circulates is sloppy, so looking is still worth doing. Just do not mistake "I looked and it seemed fine" for evidence.
What are the signs of an AI generated image?
In rough order of how useful they still are:
- Written text inside the picture. Shop signs, book spines, badges, labels, number plates. Text is the most reliable remaining tell — look for letters that are almost words, or that change style halfway along.
- The background, not the subject. Effort goes into the face in front. Behind it you find people with merged limbs, doorways that lead nowhere, railings that change spacing, the same face repeated twice in a crowd.
- Things that should match but do not. One earring different from the other, glasses with mismatched arms, a patterned shirt whose pattern does not continue across a seam, teeth that vary in size.
- Physics. Shadows falling in two directions, a reflection that does not correspond to the scene, water or glass that bends nothing.
- The overall finish. Skin slightly too even, lighting slightly too flattering, everything slightly too composed. Real photographs contain more accident than this.
- Fingers and limbs. Still worth a glance, but this is now the weakest item on the list, not the strongest.
Microsoft's own guidance still leads with extra fingers and warped hands, which tells you something about how quickly this advice ages.
Do AI image detectors actually work?
Not well enough to settle an argument.
Upload the same picture to three of these free tools and you will often get three different answers. They do not return verdicts, they return confidence percentages — and a percentage feels like a fact while being a guess. Two failures matter in particular:
- They flag real photographs as AI. Heavy editing, a phone's automatic beautifying, a compressed screenshot, an unusual lighting setup — all can push a genuine picture over the line. This is not rare, and it is the more damaging error: accusing a real photograph of being fake.
- They miss good fakes. Detection is always chasing generation, and generation is where the money is.
Treat a detector result as one weak opinion. Never as proof, in either direction — and never as something to repeat to other people as if it were.
How do I check where a photo came from?
This is the better question, and it is the point of the whole article. Stop asking "does this look fake" and start asking "where did this come from". Appearance is what the tools are optimised to get right. Origin is much harder to fake.
Two things anyone can do, in under a minute:
- Reverse image search it. Save the picture, then upload it to Google Images or another image search. You are looking for the earliest place it appeared and whether any established news organisation used it. A dramatic photograph that exists only on social media, with no original source, is telling you something.
- Check for Content Credentials. A growing number of cameras, phones and editing programs attach a signed record of how an image was made and changed — an industry standard called C2PA. Where it is present, it is far stronger than any detector.
Both have the same limitation, and you should know it: most social platforms strip this information out when an image is uploaded, and a screenshot destroys it entirely. So absence of credentials proves nothing at all. Presence of them proves quite a lot.
When does this actually matter?
Almost never, and then suddenly very much.
An invented photograph of a celebrity costs you nothing. The images worth checking are the ones attached to a decision: a rental property, a marketplace listing, a dating profile, a charity appeal after a disaster, a product that looks impossibly good, a screenshot presented as proof of something a public figure said.
The pattern is the same one that runs through every convincing scam: an image arrives together with urgency and a request. That combination — not the picture's pixels — is the thing to notice. It is the same structure as a phone call in a familiar voice asking for money now.
How the same trick works with voices, and the one habit that defeats it →
The short version
Counting fingers is out of date. Look at text, backgrounds and things that should match.
Detectors are not proof. They disagree with each other and they flag real photos as fake.
Ask where it came from, not what it looks like. Reverse image search takes 30 seconds.
Missing Content Credentials mean nothing — platforms strip them. Present ones mean a lot.
Only check when something is being asked of you. Image plus urgency plus a request is the pattern.
Every one of these tells will expire. The habit will not.
This page will be partly wrong within a year — that is the nature of the subject. What does not expire is a working picture of what these tools can and cannot do, because that is what lets you judge something new without waiting for an article about it.
That is what the cards are for. Getting Comfortable with AI is twenty cards that go from "what is this thing" to "here is where it gets things wrong" — one clear idea and one useful thing to do on each. The whole set takes about 15 minutes to read — it is a set of cards, not a course. No jargon, no assumed background.
Free, and it stays free. 15 minutes — less time than it took to read this page.
Next: Can scammers copy my family's voice? · Is ChatGPT safe to use? · Explore AI for Beginners · Return to Yilume
Sources. Microsoft, How to tell if images are AI-generated, for the visual tells and the caution that platforms strip metadata. Content Credentials is the consumer name for the C2PA provenance standard; see contentcredentials.org. The unreliability of consumer AI image detectors, including false positives on genuine photographs, is widely documented across independent testing. Current as of August 2026.