Is This Wallpaper AI-Generated? What to Look For
A few quiet checks that separate a photograph from a picture that was never in front of a lens.
Start with the far distance. A camera records the back of a valley with the same honesty as the front, only softer and bluer; a generated image tends to lose its nerve past the middle ground, where trees turn into a green paste and ridgelines fork and rejoin without ever deciding. Zoom in on a small village, a fence, a line of poles, and ask whether each thing has an exact edge or merely the suggestion of one.
Then check the light against itself. In a photograph every shadow points away from one sun, water reflects what actually stands above it, and a mountain's lit face agrees with the clouds about where the morning is coming from. Generated scenes often carry two or three light sources that nobody placed, a lake that mirrors a sky slightly different from the one overhead, and a sunset glow that reaches the shaded side of a rock. Counting shadows takes ten seconds and catches more than any detector.
The last tell is in the repeats. Real pebbles, leaves and windows are each slightly wrong in their own way; synthetic ones rhyme, the same pebble reappearing four times with its mirror image. None of this makes a generated picture a bad wallpaper, and many of them are handsome. It only matters that the screen is where you look for hours, and a scene that falls apart on close inspection tends to be noticed, eventually, by the person sitting nearest to it.
