I wrote this little essay for the older members of my family who don't necessarily know how to identify whether an image is A.I. generated or not. The examples are from a small business that resells clothing, sort of an upscale thrift shop aimed at teens and young adults. I've blacked out the address and shop name to hopefully not make it obvious which business.
Question: Was this flyer A.I. generated?
Start with general considerations: how complex is the art? Would it take a long time or a high level of skill to make? Who is posting the image? Would this person or business have reasonably been able to produce this image themselves? Is it likely they would have paid an artist to create it?
In this case, the answer is a small resale shop with two locations probably would NOT have paid anyone to produce art at this level of complexity (look at the amount of shading-- digital painting like this takes a lot of skill). That is a good indicator that they generated the image with A.I.-- Occam's Razor rules. (i.e. the simplest explanation is usually the correct explanation).
It's also helpful to look for details in the image. Think of it less as looking for flaws or mistakes, and more as looking for things that a human artist would not choose to put in their image. Asymmetry with no purpose, lines that don't connect, and complicated objects that don't look quite right (like the ribbons) are all common tells.
Things that are "too obvious" will probably be scrapped by the human involved, so it's unlikely you'll find eight fingers on a hand, but keep in mind that A.I. does not actually KNOW anything. It's copying and reassembling human art pixel by pixel. It's going to do things wrong in a different way than a human would.
Think of the way a person, even an artist, who has never studied drawing cars would draw a car-- versus the way A.I. would generate a car. A human artist who knows they can't draw a car would be unlikely to fully polish their ugly car illustration, and the parts might be in the wrong places, but wrong in a way that a human working from memory would come up with. A.I. generation would produce a highly polished image that more closely resembled a car...but the hubcap on one wheel would be a different color or size. Even a highly amateur human artist with a terrible memory would know to make the wheels the same color and size.
Compare the simpler flyer below. This looks like they used premade assets (the seal with the hanger, the wave design) and placed it and colored it themselves (note how the colors are a limited palette, except not all the blues are quite the same, like someone manually matched it the best they could). And what did they use for decoration? Emojis! This is totally a Canva-style design, lol. And it's what all small business flyers looked like circa 2021, before the first A.I. image generator was released to the public.
I hope this is helpful in some way! Critical viewing is important in this day and age.