Every day, fake pictures are getting more realistic. Today, anyone can access a web-based program like Midjourney or Dall-e and create artificial or manipulated images without much effort.

The good news is that humans have a natural instinct for sniffing them out, according to Siwei Lyu, professor of computer science and engineering at the University at Buffalo. Lyu belongs to a group of researchers battling AI with AI—they’ve found the best way to teach an AI to find synthetic images is to show them how humans do it.

We’ve been dealing with falsified images for a very long time. Image manipulation has been around just about as long as photography itself. Take, for example, this photo from 1860 with Abraham