Remember when AI images were a punchline? The warped fingers, rubbery limbs, and otherworldly gloss were instant giveaways. Not anymore. AI image generators have gotten so good at creating convincing fakes by embracing the imperfections of real cameras that telling what's real from what's synthetic has become almost impossible. The trick? They stopped trying to be perfect.
The early days of AI image generation were pure comedy gold. Your prompts would yield people with too many fingers, textures that looked like digital soup, and an uncanny smoothness that screamed 'fake.' But that era is decisively over. The shift didn't happen because AI engineers finally cracked photorealism. It happened because they stopped chasing it.
Google dropped a reality check in late 2025 when it unveiled Nano Banana Pro within its Gemini app. The model went viral almost immediately, with people using it to create weirdly convincing figurines of themselves. But here's the thing that makes it different: instead of rendering everything with that signature AI glow, Nano Banana Pro deliberately imitates the look of photos captured on a phone camera. That means contrast issues, aggressive sharpening artifacts, the weird perspective compression phones create, and all those processing choices that make a snapshot from your device instantly recognizable.
This is the paradox at the heart of modern AI image generation. The things that make a photo look real aren't technical perfection. They're imperfections. Ben Sandofsky, cofounder of the acclaimed iPhone camera app Halide, explained it best: by embracing the look of phone camera processing, which already makes our photos look "a little untethered from reality," Google might have sidestepped the uncanny valley entirely. AI doesn't need to recreate reality with museum-quality accuracy. It just needs to mimic how we've all learned to record reality, flaws included.
It's not just Google playing this game. Adobe's Firefly image generator includes a "Visual Intensity" control that lets users tone down that glossy, hypersmoothed aesthetic. Meta offers a "Stylization" slider. Even OpenAI's video generation tool Sora 2 produces convincing clips by mimicking the grainy, low-resolution look of security camera footage. When the baseline is CCTV quality instead of Vogue cover perfection, making an AI-generated video look believable becomes almost trivial.
The progression from DALL-E's earliest iterations is staggering. Five years ago, OpenAI launched with 256x256 pixel thumbnails. A year later, DALL-E 2 jumped to 1024x1024 images that looked shockingly real at first glance, but started falling apart under scrutiny. There were still tells. The dog in a firefighter outfit had fuzzy contours and weird patches. The whole thing carried an air of stylization you'd associate with an illustration rather than a photograph.