Is this photo of a person real?

Fake profile pictures are the most common AI images you'll meet: dating profiles, marketplace sellers, sudden new followers. Most can be caught in under a minute with the right checks.

Start with the parts AI still gets wrong

Look past the face itself, generators are excellent at faces now, and check the edges of the person instead. Ears and earrings often mismatch between sides. Teeth can blur together or repeat. Glasses frames bend or merge into skin. Hair strands dissolve into the background instead of crossing it. Necklaces, collars, and shirt seams frequently break or change pattern halfway across.

Check the background and the crop

AI portraits tend to have dreamy, out-of-focus backgrounds with melted details: text that isn't quite letters, windows that don't line up, other "people" who are shapes rather than persons. A suspiciously tight head-and-shoulders crop is itself a tell, it hides the hands and surroundings where mistakes live.

One photo is a red flag by itself

Real people leave trails: multiple photos across time, different lighting, different angles, tagged appearances in other people's pictures. An account with exactly one flawless, studio-quality portrait and nothing else behaves like a generated identity, because generating a second consistent photo of the same fake person is still hard.

Then let a detector look

Eyes catch the obvious fakes; a detector catches the statistical ones. Run the photo through the detector, and crop to the face region for the cleanest read, a full screenshot with interface chrome around it dilutes the signal. A high AI score plus any of the visual tells above is about as close to certainty as this gets.