Artist's guide to how to spot AI images is essential reading

AI-generated imagery has exploded online, and it's starting to become hard to tell if an image is real or not. With today's attention spans, we tend to flick through content on social media at a rapid rate, and we don't have the time to analyse every image or video very closely. As a result, there are social media accounts that seem to specialise in pumping out images that can notch up thousand of likes and shares but don't stand up to very deep scrutiny.

In a bid to stop the spread of such disinformation, a comic book artist has produced an illustrated guide to how to spot an AI image. The clear illustrations point out some of the smaller details that might go overlooked at first glance but which can be clear giveaways that an image was made using one of the best AI image generators – at least for now.

Peter Chiykowski, who draws comics under the name @RockPaperCynic, is concerned about the threat of disinformation that AI-generated images presents. As he points out in one post on X, none of us have the time to research every image we see on social media, and we might like or share it thinking that it was real or created by a human artist. 

After spotting examples of AI-generated images getting thousands of likes, Peter decided to use his own sketching skills to create a fun but informative guide to how to spot such fakes. "Fake lifestyle photos are mostly harmless," he writes. "But as social algorithms incentivize pages to flood the internet with fake images and our likes/shares feed the machine, I think it's important to practice both soft skepticism and hard skills in assessing the truth of what we see."

The guide points out some of the little anomalies and artifacts that still tend to crop up in AI images, including elements in illogical places and distortions in complex patterns or lines that should be symmetrical. Other telltale signs are warped borders and dodgy spelling.

There are still no international regulations on the use of AI imagery. The European Union has taken steps to draft regulations that would require AI images to be flagged with disclaimers, but the EU Artificial Intelligence Act has yet to be approved and it remains to be seen how it will be policed and enforced. That means that for now accessible and entertaining guides like Peter's should perhaps be obligatory reading for anyone with a computer or a social media account. He says he plans to produce comics about AI/media literacy.