Tech
The best tool for detecting AI images and videos isn’t what you think
The internet is awash with AI images and videos to the point where it’s hard to trust anything you see online anymore. That’s where AI detectors come in, separating fact from prompt… right?
Unfortunately, there’s simply no reliable way to detect AI-generated images or videos.
Detecting AI-generated content is easier said than done
There are all manner of AI detection tools out there, but none of them are guaranteed to work. In fact, AI detectors are so unreliable that MIT’s AI Resource Hub has a whole guide to advise educators on how to navigate the problem. While this is mostly concerned with text, image, and video detectors don’t fare much better.
Generative AI is an arms race, where companies like Google and OpenAI are throwing vast amounts of resources into creating better models that can generate more realistic-looking creations. These companies are working on solving some of the telltale signs that make it easy to distinguish generated media. Technology is improving constantly, even if things aren’t quite accelerating at the pace they once were.
There appear to be just as many tools out there for detecting AI-generated content as there are for making it. Even worse, none of it works with any degree of certainty. You can put this to the test with your own AI-generated creations.
For this test, I generated a “realistic image of a beach on a cloudy day” using Gemini and Google’s Nano Banana image generation model. This is among one of the better models out there, but it’s still free to use. Since Gemini gave me a square image, I decided to crop it quickly using an image editing app to a less obvious 16:9 aspect ratio. Lastly, I dropped the image into PicScrubber to remove any telltale metadata from the image (a process that happens when you upload images to most platforms).
Here’s my dreary seaside vista:
I dropped this into one detection tool, and would you look at that:
Buoyed by my success, I tried another:
Once more, for luck:
Your eyes are the best AI detectors
The thing is, I don’t really blame the AI detectors for not being able to spot that my image was AI-generated. I’d go as far as saying that most people wouldn’t think it was AI-generated either, particularly as I picked such a lifeless scene. You might argue that things would be a little more obvious had I chosen something more outlandish.
Looking at the image, you might think something is up when you see the wave break on the right. Do waves break like that? And those (presumably) seagulls in the sky, they look a little haphazardly placed. Either way, it’s not the easiest fake in the world to spot.
There are some things you can look for and some questions that you might want to ask yourself when you come across media you suspect isn’t genuine, but it’s harder than ever to be truly confident.
It can be easy to miss the more obvious signs of AI-generated content in the background when you’re focused on the foreground. Take a look at the background and look for things that are out of place. People with weird faces, windows with inconsistent numbers of panes, buildings, and trees that don’t make sense.
Is the image tinged orange? ChatGPT generates a lot of images with an orange glow. Cleaning this up in post is fairly trivial, but a lot of users neglect to do so. At the same time, certain generative models have distinct and recognizable styles. ChatGPT’s font is fairly recognizable once you’ve seen a few creations, for example, as is its generic “comic strip” style of illustration.
When it comes to “art,” as in AI creations posing as human-authored creations, deliberate decisions are what you should be looking for. Lines that seem out of place, leaves in a tree that don’t connect to anything, pencil “guide lines” that don’t make any sense (as if they were added after the fact).
Ask yourself if an artist would choose to put pen to paper and produce these details, even if they seem trivial. Not everyone is a gifted artist, but the “artwork” that’s being generated by these models is usually intended to demonstrate proficiency.
If I could sum all of this up in one word, it would be “vibes.”
Train yourself to better identify AI-generated images and videos
Since you can’t depend on AI-detection services, even those that happen to have a premium plan, you’ve got to draw your own conclusions. If you’re anything like me, you might want to turn this into a bit of a game and learn the telltale signs at the same time. The more you play, the more you learn.
There are subreddits like r/isthisAI and r/RealOrAI where community members post videos and images to try and work out whether or not the content is real or not. Once you’ve viewed enough of these posts, you’ll start to pick up on some of the things mentioned in the previous section.
While many of these posts are genuine requests, others are deliberately designed to stir up discussion. Many users generate images and post them, then provide some closure as to whether the image is real or not.
If you’re going to be endlessly scrolling past a bunch of AI-generated images and videos on social media, you might as well learn something at the same time, right?
It’s been a while since we’ve looked at ways to spot and AI image and the telltale signs of AI-generated video, particularly with technology moving so fast.
Find yourself looking for a more useful example of AI technology? Give NotebookLM a whirl.
