By: Kyle Xu

AI has an unimaginable range of capabilities, from doing your English essay to calculating your finances. But AI can generate pictures that rival those taken in real life.

Somebody posted an AI generated image of Katy Perry attending the 2024 Met Gala on X and it went viral. People quickly realized that Katy Perry hadn’t attended the Gala and that the carpet happened to be from the 2018 Gala.

However, many people were also fooled by the picture. So it’s important to have some techniques of your own to discern the truth.

One way is to focus on the details of the picture. For example, look at the words on someone’s jacket. Are they illegible? Or are they gibberish? AI technology only pools together the many real life images online to produce their own, meaning that they could make a mistake with the designs or letters on your jacket.

Check out their features, too. While AI is less likely to make mistakes on the main focus of the picture, it commonly mixes up the background. Hey, is that a slide at the park? Wait a moment… It’s floating!

So next time you catch any of these inconsistencies? It could be just how someone really looks – but it is just as likely to be an AI generated picture.

Another common giveaway is if everything looks perfect beyond imagination, which is easy to tell in portraits of humans. If the skin is flawless and without detail, it is probably AI generated. There is a term for this effect: “airbrushed.”

Also be careful of the background. Say you are looking at a picture of a Hollywood performer. If you see things like unicorns or dragons prancing around in the backyard? Not real.

But don’t forget: We can always roll up our sleeves and pull out a little bit of… more technology! Right-click and press the “Search image with Google” button. This is called a reverse image search, and it identifies the other places the image appears in the media. Most AI generated pictures only show up once or twice, but real pictures of superstars could be everywhere.

Even after knowing all of these identification “tricks,” you could still be fooled easily. And AI is steadily improving.

This instantly brings up the question of how much power AI really has. If AI is capable of one day imitating reality it could construct worlds of its own.