Don’t Be Fooled by AI: 4 Signs a Video is FAKE
You’ve probably seen it happen. Someone shares a video on Facebook, everyone reacts, someone gets upset or excited, and then three days later somebody quietly mentions: that wasn’t real.
AI-generated videos are getting so realistic that even people who work in technology are getting fooled right now.
And I don’t say that to scare you. I say it because you deserve to know, and because once you know what to look for, you’re not going to get fooled.
That’s what this post is about. Four simple checks you can do in about 30 seconds before you share anything. No tech expertise required. Just a little bit of know-how and a habit of pausing before you hit that share button. Okay?
What Is a Fake AI Video, Exactly?
Before we get into how to spot them, let me explain what we’re actually talking about.
An AI-generated video, sometimes called a deepfake, is a video where someone’s face, voice, or entire appearance has been created or altered using artificial intelligence. It might look like a real celebrity, a real doctor, a real pastor, saying something they never actually said.
These videos show up on Facebook, in your email, and in text messages from people you trust who didn’t know it was fake either. The most common ones right now are fake celebrity endorsements, fake medical advice, and fake news clips. Things designed to look official and trustworthy.
Okay. So now let’s look at how to spot them.
How to Spot a Fake AI Video: 4 Things to Check
Here’s something I want you to hold onto before we dive in. You are actually really good at sensing when something is off. You’ve been reading people and situations your whole life. That’s not nothing. That’s a skill. These four checks are just giving that skill a new place to work.
Check #1: Watch the Edges of the Face
This one gives it away more often than anything else.
In an AI-generated video, the edges of a person’s face, especially around the hairline, ears, and neck, will sometimes look slightly blurry or too smooth. Like someone smudged the outline with their thumb. Real video has a crispness to it even at lower quality. AI video often has this quality where the person looks like they’ve been cut out and pasted onto the background.
The really advanced fakes are getting better at hiding this. But if you look at the border of the face and something feels slightly off, trust that feeling. That’s your instincts doing their job.
Check #2: Listen to the Voice
AI voices have gotten incredibly realistic. Shockingly good, honestly.
But there are still a few tells. Human speech has a natural rhythm that speeds up and slows down, gets louder and softer, pauses in unexpected places. AI voices tend to be a little too even, a little too smooth, like someone is reading very carefully from a script with no emotion underneath it.
You might also notice that the voice doesn’t quite match the mouth movement. The lips are moving but the timing is just a tiny bit off, like watching a movie where the sound isn’t quite synced.
If you notice either of those things, that’s a sign worth paying attention to.
Check #3: Look at the Eyes
This one is fascinating to me. Eyes are so, so, so hard for AI to get right.
Real eyes blink naturally and irregularly. They shift when a person is thinking. They reflect light in a specific way based on where the light actually is in the room.
AI-generated eyes tend to blink too rarely or in a pattern that feels almost robotic, too regular, too even. And the reflections sometimes don’t match the rest of the scene, like the light is coming from somewhere that doesn’t make sense.
Your brain is already wired to read eyes. It’s been doing it your whole life. If something feels glassy or distant or just a little bit wrong, pay attention to that. Your instincts are smarter than you think.
Check #4: Look It Up Before You Share
This is honestly the most important one. And it’s the simplest.
Before you share any video that feels surprising, alarming, or too good to be true, take 60 seconds and look it up. If a celebrity is supposedly saying something significant in a video, search their name and the topic. If it really happened, there will be actual news coverage. Real things get covered. Fake things exist only in the video itself.
You can also describe what you saw to Claude and ask if it checks out. Claude can help you figure out whether something is real before you pass it on to your friends and family.
The Most Important Thing to Remember
Fake videos are designed to make you feel something fast, urgency, outrage, fear, excitement, and then share before you think. The single most powerful thing you can do is pause.
Take a breath.
Check first.
Then decide.
Because once something is shared, it spreads whether it’s real or not. And you get to decide whether it spreads through your circle.
That pause?
That’s your superpower.
Your Free 4-Check Cheat Sheet
I put together a free one-page cheat sheet with all four of these checks on it. Print it out and keep it next to your computer, or send it to someone you love who shares a lot of videos online.
It’s completely free. The link is below.
Download Your Free Cheat Sheet
What’s Coming Next
Next up, I’m walking you through something that builds directly on what we covered here. Because once you feel confident about what’s real and what isn’t, the next question Carol always asks is: okay, so how do I actually start using AI myself? That’s exactly where we’re going.
→ Watch it here
And before you jump in, take two minutes to find out which AI tool is the right fit for you. I built a free quiz for exactly this.
→ Take the AI Tool Navigator quiz: aitoolguide.krisvoelker.ai
Alright, my friends. Take care. Bye bye.
About Kris Voelker: Kris is the founder of Second Act with AI and the creator of the RECIPE Framework for AI prompt writing. She teaches AI tools and digital literacy to people over 60 at secondactwithai.com.
