Real photos and hand-crafted art have a depth and authenticity that AI can’t quite match. Some AI-generated images look shockingly real, but a closer look will often reveal subtle flaws. Once you’re able to spot these inconsistencies, the illusion quickly falls apart.

11

Eyes That Don’t Look Human

If you’ve ever come across a portrait that doesn’t sit right, the eyes are often to blame. AI can produce fascinating art, but it struggles with capturing human emotion and the subtle details of eyes, resulting in stares that seem vacant, mismatched, or simply unsettling.

Pupils may be misaligned, one iris might appear larger than the other, or the gaze might lack the natural depth that makes human faces feel alive. Instead, you’ll often see lifeless expressions, devoid of any substance. The emotional disconnect is subtle but deeply disconcerting, often causing immediate distrust without quite knowing why.

10

Mangled Logos or Branding

Branding is rarely accurate in AI-generated images. You might see a Nike logo that’s been warped or merged with elements from another brand, or random symbols that resemble logos but don’t exist.

These distortions reveal the model’s lack of contextual understanding, and they’re easy to spot if you’re familiar with the brand being imitated. The finer details—such as font weight, spacing, or the shape of a particular object—are where the inconsistencies most often show up. This is especially obvious when the model tries to blend multiple logos into one.

Interestingly, I noticed in my testing that almost every AI image generator tends to throw in the Coca Cola logo (or a similar variant of it) into any scene where it makes sense—and most are able to replicate it fairly accurately. It leads me to believe that many users are requesting this specific logo, and as a result, AI models have been trained to generate it more often than other brands.

9

Impossible Reflections

Mirrors, water, and glass can easily expose AI’s shortcomings. Reflections may be missing altogether, or they might contain mismatched or distorted elements, immediately contradicting the image’s actual placement.

In some cases, you’ll notice reflections that contain extra limbs or objects not present in the main image. In other extreme cases, the reflection itself will literally step out of the mirror and become part of the world surrounding it. These AI-generated images can feel like a snapshot straight out of an early 2000s horror movie.

While the real world adheres to the laws of physics and light, AI images often do not. The more reflective surfaces present, the more chances for these inconsistencies to appear.

8

Nonsense Architecture

AI may be able to imitate the style of architecture, but it struggles with structure. Look closely at buildings in AI-generated images, and you’ll often find design elements that make no practical—or physical—sense.

Staircases might lead directly into walls. Doorways float above the ground with no way to reach them. Windows can appear squashed together or oddly spaced, as if randomly copied and pasted from other buildings. Roofs sometimes intersect at impossible angles, and support columns might vanish into thin air or pierce through floors without logic.

AI doesn’t truly understand engineering or gravity—it’s guessing based on visual patterns. As a result, it often produces structures that look like buildings at first glance, but fall apart under scrutiny.

7

Backgrounds That Don’t Add Up

At first glance, the foreground of an image may appear convincing. That is, until you notice something bewildering in the background.

A tree growing from a rooftop, people floating slightly above the ground, the Eiffel Tower placed in a suburban parking lot. Figures may appear half-merged into objects, blending into buildings, cars, or fences like visual glitches.

Sometimes, it’s the scale that feels wrong: a cat the size of a mailbox, or a streetlamp that barely reaches eye level. Other times, you’ll catch unidentifiable blobs or textures standing in for real objects—things that don’t belong anywhere in the natural world.

AI can fake detail, but it often fails to place those details where they make sense. Certain AI art generators are capable of creating photorealistic results, but even the most advanced ones struggle to produce a clean, logical background. The result is a scene that looks believable if you really squint your eyes.

6

Blurry or Garbled Background Figures

Similar to the previous point, people in the background are typically low-priority in AI renderings. As a result, they often appear blurry, incomplete, or twisted into impossible poses.

These ghost-like figures might have facial features that are melted or indistinct, and their postures can be disorienting. Limbs might overlap in strange ways, or heads may float slightly above the neck without proper alignment. In group scenes, you might spot repeated faces, mirrored hairstyles, or people locked in the same pose, wearing oddly similar clothing.

To AI, background figures serve as visual afterthoughts. They become unsettling silhouettes that reveal the image’s artificial origins. No matter how sharp the foreground may be, these subjects are a clear sign that what you’re seeing isn’t an organic image.

5

Over-Smoothing and Plastic Skin

AI-generated people often appear to have skin that’s been airbrushed into oblivion. This stems from how AI handles facial features and textures; it tends to favor smoothness over realism.

Pores disappear. Wrinkles, freckles, and scars are erased. The result is a waxy, overly polished complexion that lacks the texture of real skin. Often, this smoothing effect extends beyond the face, affecting necks, hands, and even clothing. It creates an oddly artificial appearance.

There are plenty of AI art generators that can create images from text, but most of them suffer from this exact issue. Only newer models, such as GPT-4o, can create incredibly realistic images that avoid subjects with plastic skin.

4

Hands That Make No Anatomical Sense

This remains one of the most obvious giveaways. AI has long struggled with rendering hands accurately, and although improvements have been made, distorted digits are still a clear sign.

Look for extra fingers, fused joints, unnatural bends, or fingers emerging from palms. Since AI doesn’t truly “understand” human anatomy, it often produces a mangled-up mess.

Thumbs are particularly telling. If you zoom in and examine closely, you’ll likely find something odd. Sometimes, entire hands are positioned at impossible angles, or they seem too small or large in proportion to the body.

3

Melting Text or Gibberish Letters

AI-generated images consistently fail when it comes to text. Ask for a street sign or product label, and you’ll often get jumbled, unreadable characters that resemble the aftermath of a Scrabble mishap.

AI image generator models are trained on visual data, not language comprehension. As a result, they often produce letter-like shapes that mimic text without forming real, readable words. Even when a word appears recognizable at first glance, closer inspection usually reveals extra strokes, inconsistent fonts, or spacing that doesn’t make sense.

It’s important to note that a few advanced models are capable of generating legible text, although you can sometimes still spot minor inconsistencies. This article about the most dangerous writing app features a GPT-4o generated image of a keyboard covered in randomized shapes and letters.

There are tools that you can use to fix gibberish text in AI-generated images, but not all are effective.

2

Inconsistent Light Sources

Lighting errors are another frequent red flag. You might see shadows pointing in conflicting directions, or a person lit from the left while casting a shadow in the same direction. Shadows may appear too soft, too sharp, or completely absent.

Though most people aren’t lighting experts, we all have an intuitive sense of how light should behave. When AI fails to follow those rules, it stands out—even if only subconsciously.