Learn to spot fake AI photos while you still can:
“Digital Forensics Expert Provides Helpful Tips for Spotting AI Generated Images,” by Lori Dorn, Laughing Squid, July 22, 2025.
“During a truly informative TED talk, Professor Hany Farid of UC Berkeley shared his expertise as a digital forensics expert to give helpful tips in spotting whether or not an image was AI generated.
Digital forensics expert Hany Farid explains how he helps journalists, courts and governments find structural errors in AI-generated images, offering four practical tips everyday individuals can use when facing the internet’s war on reality.
Farid explains how AI does not understand the physics, geometry and other real world issues, so it will inevitably make mistakes in perspective, an anomaly that can be tracked. One such error is that of the vanishing point, in which parallel lines, such as railroad tracks, will seem to converge the further it is away from the eye.
Fake videos can now be created using a machine learning technique called a “generative adversarial network”, or a GAN. A graduate student, Ian Goodfellow, invented GANs in 2014 as a way to algorithmically generate new types of data out of existing data sets. For instance, a GAN can look at thousands of photos of Barack Obama, and then produce a new photo that approximates those photos without being an exact copy of any one of them, as if it has come up with an entirely new portrait of the former president not yet taken. GANs might also be used to generate new audio from existing audio, or new text from existing text – it is a multi-use technology.