KENT COUNTY, Mich. — With AI-generated photos becoming more prevalent on social media, and especially as the country nears the presidential election, you may be wondering how to tell if an image or video was made by AI.
Dr. Greg Gogolin, professor and director for the Center of Cyber Security and Data Science at Ferris State University, says you can learn much more about a photo by simply doing a reverse google search.
Taking a screenshot of an image, and uploading it to images.goole.com, will search Google for that image.
"It will show you other places where that image may be posted about, so it might tell you if it's maybe from a news source, or something that might be legitimate," said Gogolin.
If the image in question is ran through a Google search, Gogolin says a way to tell if it is AI is seeing subjects within the photo showing up in other photos.
"You might see one of the subjects in a picture in one image, and maybe another subject of the picture in another image," said Gogolin. "Let's say you have a picture of somebody in a boat fishing, well, you might find the picture of other people in that same boat, and then you might see an image of just that person in another context."
Reverse searching an image can also show where it has been published in its original context, such as a news article, if the photo is legitimate.
"Some of the things you can do would be to look for maybe distortions in the image, does the background match the image?" said Gogolin.
He says distortions such as people having the wrong number of fingers, hands blending together with other parts of the photo, or traits that seem to defy physics or human anatomy can all be giveaways for an AI-made image.
"For a face-swap situation, look at the neck. The neck is where things connect, so if the neck looks really kind of out of focus, but the face looks very much in focus, that is a tip off," said Gogolin.
He also warns that using distortions to tell if an image was made by AI is becoming more difficult as AI tools become more sophisticated.
For telling is a video has been manipulated by AI, Gogolin explains that looking and hearing closely can go a long way.
"You can also look for latency. Does the person that's speaking, if it's a video, does the audio line up? Or is there maybe some things where the lips don't quite match what the words are," said Gogolin.
"Most important thing to remember is to be a little bit wary, because not everybody has your best interest in mind, whether they're on social media or otherwise."