Spot AI-Made Media

You scroll past hundreds of photos a day. A lot are real. But more and more — AI is making them up. Faces, places, events that never happened. Spotting the fakes is a survival skill now. Let's get you good at it.

Quick refresher. AI doesn't actually know what a hand IS. It just learned what hands tend to look like — and predicts pixels that match. Sometimes the prediction breaks. Those broken bits leave clues we call artifacts.

Tell number one — count the fingers. AI is famously bad at hands. Six fingers, missing knuckles, or fingers that look like they're melting into a cup. People have five fingers per hand. Always check.

Tell number two — faces. Eyes that don't quite match. Teeth that look like dentures. Ears that are different sizes or shapes. AI gets the overall vibe right but the symmetry is off. Trust your gut when something feels weird about a face.

Big tell — text. Try to read any words in an AI image. Signs, book covers, t-shirts. They usually look like alphabet soup. Real photos have real text that you can actually read.

Now video. Deepfakes are face-swaps. Watch the lips — usually out of sync, like a badly dubbed movie. Watch the blinking — real people blink steadily, deepfakes either don't blink or do weird flutter-blinks. And the hairline — often fuzzy, like the face is glued on top.

AI text — chatbots — has its own tell. They can confidently say something completely made up. We call this hallucination. AI invents court cases that don't exist. Quotes from people who never said them. Always, always check important facts somewhere else before trusting them.

Before you share anything sketchy, run it through SIFT. S — stop, don't react. I — investigate the source: who posted this? F — find better coverage: do other places say the same? T — trace claims back to the original. SIFT. Four letters. Could save you from sharing a fake.

Your turn. I'll show you an AI-glitched scene — and your job is to tap exactly where the tell is. Five rounds. Look at hands, faces, text, mouths. The one that feels off? That's the spot.

Recap the field guide. Hands first. Then faces. Then any text in the image. For video — lips, blinking, hairlines. For chatbots — never trust facts unchecked. And when in doubt, SIFT it. You've got this.

AI gets better every month. Tells from last year don't always work this year. So really — the most important skill is the habit. Pause. Question. Verify. Don't be the kid who shares the fake.