Your social media feed is being taken over by AI video slop. There's one giveaway that can help you spot the fakes – does it look like it was filmed on a potato?

It's over. You're going to fall for it. You probably have already. In the last six months, AI video-generators got so good that our relationship with cameras is about to melt. Here's the best-case scenario: you'll get fooled, over and over again, until you're so fed up that you question every single thing you see. Welcome to the future.

But for now, there are still a few red flags to look out for. One stands out. If you see a video with bad picture quality – think grainy, blurry footage – alarm bells should go off in your head that you might be watching AI.

"It's one of the first things we look at," says Hany Farid, a computer-science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, a pioneer in the field of digital forensics and the founder of the deepfake detection company GetReal Security.

The sad truth is AI video tools will eventually get even better, and this advice will soon be useless. That could happen in months, or it could take years. Hard to say! Sorry. But if you swim around in the nuance with me for a minute, this tip could save you from some AI junk until you learn to change how you think about the truth.

Let's be clear. This isn't evidence. AI videos are not more likely to look bad. The best AI tools can deliver beautiful, polished clips. And low-quality clips aren't necessarily made by AI, either. "If you see something that's really low quality that doesn't mean it's fake. It doesn't mean anything nefarious," says Matthew Stamm, a professor and head of the Multimedia and Information Security Lab at Drexel University, US.

Instead, the point is that blurry, pixelated AI videos are the ones that are more likely to trick you, at least for right now. It's a sign you may want to take a closer look at what you're watching.

"The leading text-to-video generators like [Google's] Veo and OpenAI's Sora still produce small inconsistencies," Farid says. "But it's not six fingers or garbled text. It's more subtle than that."

Even today's most advanced models often introduce problems such as uncannily smooth skin textures, weird or shifting patterns in hair and clothing, or small background objects that move in impossible or unrealistic ways. It's all easy to miss, but the clearer the picture is, the more likely you are to see those tell-tale AI errors.

That's what makes lower-quality videos so seductive. When you ask the AI for something that looks like it was shot on an old phone or security camera, for example, it can hide the artefacts that might otherwise tip people off.

Over the past few months, a few high-profile AI videos fooled huge numbers of people. They all had something in common. A fake but delightful video of wild bunnies jumping on a trampoline got over 240 million views on TikTok. Millions of other online romantics hit the like button on a clip of

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