How to Spot AI Art.

AI-generated imagery is getting harder to spot, but it still leaves clues. For illustrators, art directors, and audiences alike, learning to recognise the signs matters more than ever. AI can imitate a style convincingly, but it struggles to reason about how objects, anatomy, and details actually work — and that’s where it gives itself away.

Below is a practical checklist of the signs we look for, drawn from our own “spot the AI art” challenge. Once you know what to look for, you’ll start seeing them everywhere.

1. Merging and blending where things should be separate
One of the most reliable giveaways. AI often melts distinct objects into one another because it doesn’t understand them as separate things. Watch for petals merging into neighbouring petals, a flower stem blending into an adjacent flower, a finger merging into an object or a face, a cat’s front leg dissolving into its chest, or background hills bleeding together. If two things that should have a clear edge seem to fuse, be suspicious.

2. Wrong or inconsistent counts
AI can’t reliably count. Hands are the classic case — look for extra fingers, missing fingers, or a different number of fingers on each hand. But it applies to everything: an animal with a different number of toes on each foot, guitar tuning pegs that don’t match string count, or “crab claw” hands where fingers lack proper definition.

3. Details that are messy, unclear, or purposeless
Human artists make deliberate choices. AI fills space with detail that doesn’t mean anything. Look for messy or unclear detail in flowers and foliage, random dots or marks with no pattern, “floaties” — small specks drifting in the image for no reason, shapes that don’t clearly represent any object, and shadows that fall inconsistently or seem randomly placed.

4. Text is almost always wrong
If there’s lettering, check it closely. AI frequently produces the same word in two different fonts, letters that don’t match in height, or nonsensical text that appears for no reason. Signage, book spines, and labels are common failure points.

5. Lines and edges that stop abruptly
Real objects continue logically. AI often lets a line or edge simply end where it shouldn’t — a window frame that stops mid-air, floorboards that stop, whiskers present on only one side of a face, an eye line that cuts off abruptly, or strings on an instrument that vanish partway.

6. Objects that defy logic or physics
Step back and ask whether the scene makes sense. Watch for a character sitting inside a bubble on nothing — not floating, not resting on anything; a person carrying baskets with no visible pole or rod between them; a safe with a handle in a shape no real safe would use; or objects floating at the same size in the background as the foreground, breaking perspective.

7. Style and texture inconsistencies
A single artwork should feel coherent. AI often can’t hold that consistency. Look for line texture that varies in a way no single digital brush would produce, one blade of grass with an internal line the others don’t have, “duplicate” objects that should be identical but differ slightly (a giveaway that they weren’t copy-pasted as a human vector artist would), and highlights or reflections that fall randomly rather than following a light source.

8. Anatomy and structure that’s subtly off
Beyond counting, AI struggles with how bodies and objects are built. Watch for eyes drifting over the nose or out of position, eyelashes detached from the eye, a paw or hand holding an object at an impossible angle, a tail that loops in an odd, purposeless way, or a beak that looks like a cross between two different animals.

Putting it into practice
No single sign is proof on its own — human artists make mistakes too, and sometimes an odd choice is deliberate. The skill is in spotting clusters of these issues. One weird shadow might be nothing; a weird shadow plus an extra finger plus text in two fonts is almost certainly AI. Learning to look closely at artwork is an important part of developing as an illustrator , helping you understand what works, what doesn’t, and why.

The longer you look, the more AI art tends to reveal itself. Train your eye, and you’ll spot it faster each time.

Want to test yourself? Take our “Can You Spot the AI Art?” challenge

This guide champions human-made illustration. The human-crafted artwork in our challenge was created by ITSme artist Esme Lee — a reminder of what real illustrators bring that AI can’t.