By: Olivia Luo

aty Perry posted an incredible photo of herself attending the 2024 Met Gala on Instagram. Even though it had over 16 million views, several angry viewers still commented on how Katy Perry must have used AI to make this photo. Some people realized the red carpet in the picture was actually from the 2018 Gala photo carpet. This year’s carpet was green and white, not red! How did they find out? That is what I’m going to tell you today.

With today’s technology it is almost impossible to figure out if a picture is real or fake. Luckily, there are still a few ways to tell them apart. It is important to know which picture is fake and which is real because if you are in a photo competition and there is an AI photo you may lose a lot of money even if you tried your best. If someone who just typed on the computer to win won, that would be very unfair to participants who spend hours or days taking a good photo.

AI commonly messes up on details. The fingers of a person in an AI generated photo may be unnaturally generated. Some AI people may have lost a finger or have very weird bumps on it. It’s clear AI struggles on contents you don’t normally see in other pictures.

Another way is to check if the picture is too perfect. These pictures often miss things that are present in real pictures. bbc.co.uk explains that, “AI images often lack details that can be found in real pictures, leading to these photos having an ‘airbrushed’ look.”

For example, no one has perfect lips and triangle ears but maybe AI people do. It is important to look at the details. Like in the gala case the viewers looked at the details like the carpet. This app can quickly calculate if it is AI or not:
AI Image Detector – a Hugging Face Space by umm-maybe

Hope this passage helped you test what’s AI and what’s not.