Real or made up? A game to spot AI images
Turn looking at pictures into a detective game. Your child learns to notice when an image was made by a machine.
Beautiful photos that never happened travel around the Internet: an AI made them. Looking at them is fine, but it is good to know when something is real and when it is made up. Turn it into a game: each person looks at an image and says 'real' or 'made up', then you check the clues together.
Clues a child can check
- The hands: count the fingers. AI sometimes draws six fingers or bends them oddly.
- The letters: signs, books or shirts with blurry or nonsense text.
- Too perfect: skin without a single pore, light like an advert, everything shiny.
- Things that melt: ears, glasses or wheels that blend into what is next to them.
- The background: people or windows that are crooked, repeated or half smudged.
The detective trick
If an image makes you unsure, ask where it came from. With a grown-up, you can search the image in reverse to see where it appeared before. And the golden question always helps: who made it and why are they sharing it? No clue decides on its own; the fun is putting several together.
Score points: one right clue, one point. In the end the winner is not who guesses most, but who best explains why they think so. That way your child does not just consume images: they learn to read them and to create their own with care.
FAQ
Is this meant to scare my child?
No. It is a game to look with curiosity, not fear. The point is to enjoy noticing details, not to distrust everything.
From what age?
Ages 8 to 12 work very well, always with a grown-up nearby for the reverse search and to talk through the clues.