(30 Sep 2025) Manipulating figures with tools like Photoshop tends to leave telltale signs such as random straight lines and duplications. ‘With AI-generated images, those hallmarks are gone,’ says image integrity consultant Mike Rossner.
Some attempts at sneaking AI-generated images into papers – for example an illustration of a rat with giant testicles – are almost laughably easy to spot. That wasn’t the case for the nanomaterials images that PhD researcher Nadiia Davydiuk created to show group leader Quinn Besford from the Leibniz Institute of Polymer Research Dresden, Germany, what was possible with AI.
‘It shocked me,’ Besford recalls. Neither he nor his colleague Matthew Faria, from the University of Melbourne, Australia, could tell the difference. ‘The people that are really working on [image integrity] are very aware of AI and are very worried about it,’ says image integrity analyst Jana Christopher.
Besford, Faria and their teams surveyed 250 scientists, asking them to distinguish real from AI-generated microscopy images. The responses confirmed that this was essentially impossible, even for experts. The team is now calling for urgent action to avoid the literature becoming swamped with fake figures.
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