How to tell if an image is AI-generated: counting fingers no longer works

You probably know the classic checklist: count the fingers, read the signs in the background, look at the ears. It was good advice once, and its moment has passed. Current generators produce correct hands, legible text and coherent reflections almost every time. Worse, the checklist breeds false confidence: whoever checked the fingers and found them fine tends to conclude the photo is real. A survey by Germany's federal cybersecurity agency paints the picture: only a minority have ever looked for inconsistencies in an image, and fewer still have ever checked the source. The exact opposite of what works.

Changing the question

The question does it look real is a dead end, because the answer keeps becoming yes. The useful questions are different: who posted this first, when and where. A striking photo of a real event leaves a trail: outlets picking it up, other angles of the same scene, witnesses. A generated image usually exists in exactly one version, posted by an account that was not there, and nobody else has it. You can check that trail in a minute with a reverse image search, uploading the picture to a search engine instead of typing words.

• Who is the original source? Follow the repost chain to the first post. If it dies at an anonymous account created two weeks ago, bad sign.
• Are there other angles? Real events produce several different photos; AI images tend to be only children.
• Is any serious outlet carrying it? If the image were real and this striking, newsrooms would have it. Their silence is information.
• What does the image make you feel? If it triggers outrage or an urge to share, double your suspicion: emotion is how fakes get distributed.

Provenance labels help, in one direction

More and more cameras, editors and generators sign their files with content credentials, metadata that records how an image was made, and several platforms show AI-content notices. When that label is present, it is valuable information. But it only works one way: its presence says a lot, its absence says nothing, because a screenshot strips the metadata in a second. The same goes for automatic AI-image detectors: a machine verdict is a hint, never proof, in either direction.

The final rule, for when you cannot know

Here is the honest part: there will be images you cannot classify, and there will be more of them. For that case the question changes once more: not can I know whether it is real, but should I share it without knowing. The short answer is no. Sharing is signing: if you cannot find the source, do not forward it, however good it is. That alone puts you ahead of most people. And if this lands close to home because the deepfake shows someone in your class, we have a separate guide for the first hours, and another with the three questions that catch a fake video.