You can sometimes spot AI-generated content from telltale signs, but detection is getting harder, so verification matters more than spotting. Here’s what to look for and how to stay sceptical.

Spotting AI text

AI text often sounds fluent but generic, over-uses certain phrasings, hedges a lot, and can include confidently stated but wrong facts or invented citations. Repetitive structure and a lack of specific, lived detail are clues. But edited AI text is hard to detect, and AI detectors are unreliable, so treat any single signal as weak.

Spotting AI images and video

AI images can have giveaways — odd hands or fingers, garbled text, inconsistent lighting or backgrounds, unnatural symmetry — though these are improving fast. AI video and deepfakes may show subtle glitches in blinking, lip-sync or edges. Again, the signs are getting subtler, so don’t rely on them alone.

Why verification beats spotting

Because detection is unreliable and improving fakes are common, the best defence is verification: check sources, confirm unexpected media through trusted channels, and be sceptical of emotionally urgent or too-good-to-be-true content. AI can fabricate facts, figures and citations with total confidence (a “hallucination”). Treat AI output as a draft and verify anything important against a reliable source — this matters most for medical, legal, financial and academic use. For important claims, find the original source rather than trusting the media itself.

If you find yourself juggling a separate subscription for chat, automation, transcription and image generation, one option worth knowing is a single platform that runs them together — osFoundry is one such agentic AI platform that consolidates chat, agents and internal apps in one workspace, with a bring-your-own-key model so you choose the underlying AI.

This article is general information, not professional, legal or financial advice. AI tools, prices and availability change fast — verify current details on the official source before you rely on them.