How to spot · HANDS & FACES

Hands and faces: where AI still slips up on people

People are the hardest thing for an AI image tool to get right, and the first place to look. The newest tools make far fewer mistakes than they did in 2023, so treat everything below as a reason to look closer, not as proof.

Start with the hands

Count the fingers. Then look at how the hand meets whatever it is holding. In AI pictures, fingers often melt into a cup, a phone or another hand, or bend in ways a knuckle cannot. Nails may be missing, or there may be one too many joints. A hand that is tucked away, cropped off or oddly blurred when the rest of the picture is sharp is worth a second look too.

Then the face, feature by feature

• Teeth: too many, too even, or blending into one white strip.
• Eyes: pupils that are different shapes, or reflections that do not match each other.
• Ears and earrings: ears that differ in shape, earrings that do not match or hang from nothing.
• Glasses: frames that fade into the skin, or lenses with different shapes.
• Skin: waxy and poreless, with the same soft light everywhere.
• Hair: strands that turn into the background, a collar or a hat.

Look past the main person

An AI tool spends its effort on the centre of the picture. The people at the edges and in the background get much less care. Look for smeared or half-formed faces in a crowd, people who share a limb, and uniforms with badges that are only shapes. In many famous fakes the main figure is convincing and the bystanders give the game away.

Check the things people wear and hold

Necklaces that are only there on one side. Ties and lanyards that vanish under nothing. Straps, zips and buttons that start and stop. Real objects are continuous; invented ones often are not.

What this cannot tell you

A picture can pass every one of these checks and still be AI-made, and a real photograph can fail some of them because of motion blur, heavy editing or a phone’s beauty filter. The only reliable answer is where the picture came from: who first posted it, and whether the person or organisation shown has confirmed it. That is why every answer in our game links to its proof.