A journalist scored 25% on an AI fake-image quiz. Experts say that is about average.
A new survey found Americans can barely tell real photos from AI-generated fakes. A CBS News reporter tried a 12-question quiz and got three right. Here is what that means for the rest of us.
Key points
- Identity verification company Veriff found in a recent survey that Americans' ability to spot AI-generated images is roughly 50/50, no better than a coin flip.
- CBS News consumer investigator Kristine Lazar scored 3 out of 12 (25%) on Veriff's detection quiz on her first attempt.
- After receiving expert guidance, Lazar retook the quiz and improved her score to 8 out of 12.
- Veriff's product director confirmed that even AI professionals cannot score 100% without specialist software tools.
Spotting a fake used to be straightforward. An AI-generated image, meaning a photo created entirely by software with no camera involved, would often show a person with extra fingers, glassy eyes, or a face that looked slightly melted. Those days are over.
Identity verification company Veriff, which helps businesses confirm that real people are behind online accounts, ran a survey asking ordinary Americans to pick out AI fakes from real photos. The result: people were right about half the time. That is not skill. That is luck.
To show what that looks like in practice, Veriff built a 12-question side-by-side quiz and invited CBS News consumer investigator Kristine Lazar to take it. She got three correct. That is 25%, or a solid F.
"I've been a consumer investigator for nearly a decade," Lazar said, "but I got an F."
She was not alone in her overconfidence. She felt sure about her choices right up until the answers appeared.
Why has spotting AI fakes become so hard?
The short answer is that the software has improved faster than human perception has kept up. Raul Liive, Veriff's product director, put it plainly: the obvious tells, blurry hands, unnatural eyes, are largely gone now because the AI models generating these images have been trained on billions of real photographs and have learned to avoid old mistakes.
"Right now, the quality is so good," Liive said.
What remains are far subtler clues. Liive told Lazar to look for small inconsistencies in facial texture, patterns in clothing that seem to dissolve into the background, and, in video, a person who blinks too rarely or whose movements change speed in a way real humans do not.
Armed with that advice, Lazar retook the quiz and scored 8 out of 12. She caught one fake by noticing the subject's earrings were slightly different sizes on each side, the kind of detail you would almost never notice in passing.
Even that improvement left four wrong answers. Liive admitted he cannot ace the test himself without extra software.
This matters beyond quiz scores. AI-generated fakes are used to build false identities for fraud, to create misleading news images, and to produce scam content that targets ordinary people. If trained professionals cannot reliably catch them by eye, neither can the rest of us.
Experts recommend using dedicated AI-detection apps rather than trusting your own judgment. When an image or video seems designed to make you feel something strongly, or to sell you something, treat that as a reason to pause and verify.
Seeing, as Lazar put it, is no longer believing.
