Like a personal assistant in your browser: ChatGPT’s MyGPTs and Claude’s Personal Projects let you tailor a bot to your needs. It’ll remember what you’ve said so you’re not starting from scratch each time. You can make one for work, scheduling, workouts, recipe ideas — whatever floats your boat!
How to spot an AI-generated image: Tips, tricks and pro tools
Forget trying to spot if a pic of a model was photoshopped. (It was.) Now we can’t even trust if the person we see in a photo or video is real.
Fear not, I’m here to help you navigate the pixelated wilderness. Let’s look at the seven telltale signs an image is AI-generated.
7 signs that should make you say ‘Hmmm’
- Perfect symmetry: To the point that you could fold an image in half and it would be perfectly mirrored on both sides. Landscape photos and close-up shots are prime candidates. Real people aren’t perfectly symmetrical.
- Distortion: There’s usually a little wonkiness or distortion hiding in an AI image. Look at the faces in a crowd; you’ll likely find someone who looks like they went for a swim in an oil painting.
- Unusual proportions: Objects might seem too big or small, like cars as tall as homes or doorways too tiny for anyone to squeeze through.
- Shadows and light: Real-world photos play nice with the laws of physics, but AI? Not so much. Shadows tend to go in all directions.
- Unnatural textures: AI has a way of making textures appear suspiciously flawless (and we’re not talking about your skin with that Instagram filter). Images might appear too smooth, with no natural textures or color variations. On the flip side, it can have the opposite effect; hyper-realistic portraits with zoom-worthy wrinkles, pores and blemishes are also a thing.
- Watermarks: Most free AI image generators stick watermarks onto their creations. You’ll usually find them in the bottom left or right corners in the form of a logo or text pointing to the source site or app.
- Weirdness: Look for oddities like strangely shaped features, too many fingers or accessories that don’t match. It’s always the small things!
Tools you can use
If you’re still feeling iffy about an image’s origin, I’ll leave you with a few AI-detection tools that caught my eye. They’re also free. Score!
- AI or Not: Simply drag and drop, upload, or paste an image URL into the search bar, and AI or Not will tell you if it’s legit.
- Maybe’s AI Art Detector: Pretty much the same as AI or Not, but it will give you the AI verdict in percentages (e.g., “20% human and 80% artificial”).
Oh, and don’t forget about our old friend, Google’s reverse image search. If Google returns the same image from credible sources, chances are it’s real. But if it points you to an AI site, you might want to sound the alarms. Here’s how to check on iPhone and Android.
✅ I’ve got one more trick only the pros know: Inspect the metadata embedded in the image itself. I’ll walk you through it.
😂 In every koi pond of four or more, at least one koi is always fake. You’ve got koi A, koi B, koi C and then the D koi. (That was so bad, it was good!)
Don’t get left behind – Stay tech ahead
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Search battle: AI chatbots vs. Google
Still turning to Google for answers? How we search online is changing faster than I’ve ever seen in tech.
Google still processes a massive 8.5 billion daily searches, but AI is coming in hot. As of July, 1.5 billion people globally were using AI chatbots, and that market is projected to hit $455 million in revenue by 2027.
Attn., writers and coders: OpenAI just launched Canvas, a new tool that lets you highlight specific text or code and make direct edits instead of starting from scratch each time. It’s available for ChatGPT Plus and Teams users. Try it out under the Model dropdown menu. Spoiler: I didn’t see much difference between it and GPT-4o.
98% accurate
Success of an AI model that examines your tongue to detect medical conditions. It’s all about color: Yellow signals diabetes, purple can mean cancer and an unusually shaped red tongue can indicate a stroke. Incredible stuff. Can you roll your tongue? I can’t.
🙏 Please be cautious about falling for heartbreaking, AI-generated images like this one circulating on social media after Hurricane Helene. Use this site to detect AI-generated images: https://hivemoderation.com/ai-generated-content-detection
Heads-up, job seekers: Over 75% of recruiters prefer AI headshots over real ones … but only when they don’t know the photo is AI-generated. Most say they’re put off by AI pics, but they’re not so great at spotting them. On average, recruiters detected AI headshots only 39.5% of the time. Moral of this story: If your real headshots stink, try an AI version.
Use AI to prep for interviews: Open your favorite AI chatbot, then copy and paste the job description. Ask it to break down the key details and responsibilities. Next, have the chatbot act as your interviewer.
Gemini Live is free to Android users: Google’s AI assistant chats in real time and you can interrupt it with new info or directions. To try it, open the Gemini app and tap the circular waveform with a sparkle icon in the bottom right. You’ll enter full-screen chat mode.
🫡 Greetings, colleague: Dreading writing an email for work? Open ChatGPT or your favorite AI chatbot. Give it a headstart by typing who you are, your recipient and what the email needs to communicate. If the first draft is awful, give feedback (e.g., “Make it sound more conversational” or “Be more confident”) until it’s ready for your edits.
🤺 Who are their competitors? You’re researching a new service for your business and don’t know who to compare it to. Or maybe you’re looking for new sales prospects. Ask ChatGPT or your favorite AI bot! It’ll spit out a list. Take it with a grain of salt; some results could be outdated.
Identity crisis: You can prime ChatGPT or any other chatbot to answer how you want with one simple phrase: “You are a …” and then fill in that blank with anything — “marketing expert,” “lawyer,” “landlord attorney,” “master gardener,” “personal trainer.” Go ahead, try “Digital Goddess.”
Nerd alert: OpenAI’s Codex (the engine behind GitHub Copilot) provides AI-powered assistance for coding and can help you write, debug and optimize code across various programming languages.
📄 Talk data to me: OpenAI paid users can upload a mountain of PDFs, data files and images. It will spit out a full analysis in moments — something that might take a human team months. It’ll even answer questions and generate charts, too.
🛌 Taller people sleep longer in bed: Women are turning to ChatGPT to catch guys lying about their height on dating apps. Upload four pics, and a bot can size someone up based on their surroundings and proportions. In a test of 10 people, ChatGPT came within an inch of assessing their real measurements. Short kings, I’ve got you: Height-increasing insoles to the rescue.
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Way easier than Photoshop: Have a ChatGPT account? You can now create two images a day for free with the DALL-E 3 generator. Use it for anything and everything: A meme, an image for a work presentation, a mockup of your next great invention — you name it.
🎙️ Speaking badly of the dead making money is a grave mistake: AI is driving new money into the estates of Hollywood legends in ElevenLabs’ Reader App. You can listen to audiobooks narrated by stars like Judy Garland, James Dean, Burt Reynolds and Sir Laurence Olivier. They only needed 30 minutes of audio to create these eerily accurate “professional voice clones.”
Quiz me: You’re trying to memorize capitals, learn a new language, whatever. Ask your favorite AI chatbot to give you a quiz. For example, “I’m learning Spanish. Please give me a quick quiz appropriate for beginners.”
📅 Cheaper than a personal assistant: ChatGPT can plan your day for you. Tell the AI your top three priorities, appointments or commitments and how long a task typically takes, then ask it to create a schedule. Bam, a bulleted list, scheduled to the minute.
No, thanks: Elon Musk wants to use your posts to train his Grok AI. You can opt out. From X on the web, click More > Settings and privacy > Privacy and safety > Grok and uncheck the box.