portrait field guide
How to Spot AI-Generated Faces and Portraits
Compare real and AI-generated portraits while learning what to check in hands, skin, hair, text, lighting, and background details.
Modern generators can produce excellent faces, so old rules such as counting fingers are no longer enough. The most useful clues are relationships between details, not a single strange pixel.
Compare facial symmetry with hair, jewelry, clothing, hands, reflections, and background text. A believable face can distract from inconsistencies elsewhere in the frame.
Inspection checklist
Inspect accessories and hair
Earrings, glasses, strands of hair, and clothing fasteners should remain structurally consistent and connect to the body in plausible ways.
Compare light sources
Catchlights, face shadows, reflective jewelry, and the background should agree about the direction and softness of the light.
Read every visible mark
Small text, tattoos, logos, and patterned fabric may look plausible at a glance but lose structure when inspected closely.
Look beyond smooth skin
Real phones apply aggressive beauty and denoising filters. Skin texture alone is weak evidence unless it conflicts with the rest of the image.
from the game
Annotated examples
Vintage-style photograph: The Electrician
Count the hands. There's one on each of her shoulders and a third gripping her dress from the bottom right, and it's hard to say whose any of them are. This is "Pseudomnesia: The Electrician" by Boris Eldagsen, made with DALL·E 2. It won the 2023 Sony World Photography Awards, and he refused the prize to make a point. The vintage look hides a lot; the anatomy doesn't.
Photo I took yesterday — cypress path to a chapel
Real, posted as a reply to an AI "dream architecture" image to show that real places can look like this too. It has the look of a phone photo: over-sharpened cypress needles, a person with a red backpack walking away, another figure further up the path, and a pile of dug-up dirt in the corner that nobody would put in a prompt.
1970s-style film photo — man resting on a bed
There's no obvious mistake here, and that's the point. An AI creative director (@gizakdag) posted it to show off a new model: "It's here and it's so good!" The warm 1970s film colours, grain and soft focus are all things you can simply type into a prompt, and the room is a set of generic mid-century props. A vintage look is not evidence that a photo is old, or real.
Grandmother's childhood photo — real or AI?
Real, but not the grandmother who claimed it. It's a professional photo by Kendra Dewe that has been on birthday cards for over 15 years. TinEye finds copies from 2008, long before AI image generators. The "four fingers" that made people suspect AI are just pinkies hidden behind the stack of Oreos. Reverse image search beats squinting at hands.
"Kiss" — horse and woman
Watch the horse's head: as it leans in, the muzzle stretches and bends like rubber, and the white marking on its face changes shape. The woman's cape is made of hundreds of identical petal shapes. AI creative director @gizakdag posted it with a single word, "Kiss." Beautiful, strange and uncaptioned is a common formula for AI clips made to be shared.
Studio portrait on a pink backdrop
Real. AI portraits tend to be symmetrical and airbrushed, and this face isn't: freckles scattered unevenly across the nose and cheeks, eyebrows that nearly meet, and stray flyaway hairs catching the light. You can see real skin texture on the nose even at this size.
Someone holding an IMAX camera
Read the camera: the close-up labels say "ROLX", "FWGN", "TEO?" and "PILLIFPN", gibberish where real equipment has crisp, meaningful text. Film geeks may also notice he's loading what looks like ordinary 35mm film, while IMAX cameras run much wider 65mm film. Posted by @mattworkman on X.
Photo of a coworker's boyfriend — catfish alert
Start with the hand on the suitcase handle: the fingers are fused into a mitten and a second thumb crosses over the wrist. His eyes are flat pale-blue rings with no iris texture, and the moustache is painted on. At the waist he wears suspenders over a belt that only exists on one side, and the tie bar floats free of the tie. The departure board behind him is rows of blurry blue blocks. A coworker showed this as a photo of her boyfriend. It's the kind of AI "perfect man" used in romance scams.
Help me prove this is AI — aunt matched with this person
Snow dusts his sleeve, but there isn't a flake in his perfectly styled hair. His teeth are a flawless row, his skin is filter-smooth, and the log yard behind him is a stock "rugged outdoorsman" backdrop. A handsome, silver-haired outdoor worker is the classic romance-scam persona. Someone's aunt matched with him on a dating app.
Dog photo sent as "proof" in an online scam
Start with the trailer outside: its branding reads "W POST" over a line of nonsense, and the nameplate below it is garbled. The trailer's back corner overlaps the office desk inside instead of stopping outside the door. The man on the right is holding a phone in hands that have melted into one lump, and the man crouching with the dog has the same problem. Up on the shelf, the cat in the top crate has a smeared face and a body that doesn't fit the box. Someone's mom got this as "proof" her puppy was ready to ship, and the scammers kept asking for transport and insurance money. SynthID confirmed an AI watermark.