There are tools that attempt to detect the likelihood that an image or text has been generated by an AI tool. Plagiarism checking tools have incorporated detection features to varying degrees of success. Your existing knowledge and skills provide an advantage when reviewing materials within your field of expertise. For materials outside of your field or your comfort zone, fact- and citation-checking skills may be utilized to aid in evaluating these materials, or assessing materials from authors with a wide range of writing styles.
There are also tools for images. For instance, this AI Image Detector allows you to drag and drop an image file. This tool is a proof-of-concept. There may be more robust tools of this type available to you to evaluate published works, or with permission from the creators, unpublished works and student assignments.
The graphic below (Gu et al., 2022) shows AI generated images to highlight how challenging it is to detect them without tools.
The first image on each row is the original image. For the first two sections, the last four images are regenerated from the first real image. Section A in the graphic below are all fake images generated from a well trained generative AI model. Section B is the result of regenerating images using a generative model trained on a single image. Section C shows the results of using generative AI to manipulate images. The generative models manipulate images by directly generating images that are similar in features but with modified content. For each group, the images in the middle are the original images, and the images on both sides are deliberately manipulated fake images.
