Reading the Signs of AI Generation
Every AI generator leaves characteristic artifacts. Learning to spot them helps identify synthetic content.
Common Visual Artifacts
- Hands: Extra or missing fingers, impossible grips.
- Text: Gibberish or distorted letters.
- Symmetry: Unnatural perfect or imperfect symmetry.
- Backgrounds: Melting or impossible architecture.
- Hair: Merging with background, unnatural flow.
Generator-Specific Tells
- Stable Diffusion: Characteristic smoothness patterns.
- Midjourney: Specific stylistic tendencies.
- DALL-E: Particular handling of edges.
- GANs: Different artifact patterns than diffusion.
Technical Fingerprints
- Frequency domain signatures.
- Noise pattern characteristics.
- Color distribution anomalies.
- Compression artifact patterns.
Quality Assessment
- Coherence: Does everything make physical sense?
- Consistency: Is lighting/perspective uniform?
- Detail: Are fine details realistic?
- Context: Does the scene make sense?
Limitations of Artifact Detection
- Quality improving rapidly.
- Post-processing removes many artifacts.
- Not all synthetic images have visible artifacts.
- Real photos can have artifact-like features.
Artifacts across different AI technologies
Each AI tool category leaves characteristic signatures. Image upscaler artifacts differ from face swap tells, which differ from deepfake and ai undress patterns. A simple image enhancer creates different artifacts than sophisticated undresser ai or photo undresser systems. Understanding these differences helps identify which ai face swap or deepfake tool generated specific content.
Forensic analysis must account for tool combinations. Content might pass through image upscaler, face swap, and image enhancer processing sequentially, each leaving traces. AI undress and photo undresser applications create specific anatomical artifacts, while general deepfake and ai face swap tools show different characteristic patterns. Artifact detection is useful but not foolproof—combine with other verification methods, especially as undresser ai and image upscaler technologies continue improving and reducing detectable signatures.