Real or AI?Can you spot the AI wildlife photo?

You get six rounds. Each shows two photographs of the same kind of wild animal, such as a brown bear, a lioness or a red fox, the sort you might see in a sighting post or a nature feed. One is a real photograph and one was generated by AI. Tap the one you think is AI, see which was which, read what gave it away, and get a score you can share.

They are public-domain or CC0 photographs from Wikimedia Commons, listed with the photographer and licence in the image credits table on this page. The AI images were generated by TimeBinder for this quiz from text descriptions of the same kinds of animals. No real person appears in any image.

In mid-October 2026, Reuters reported that a woman in Russia’s Amur region was fined 15,000 roubles after a ChatGPT-generated picture of a brown bear on a local street, made as a prank, spread through messaging apps and prompted wildlife rangers to search for an animal that was not there. The Verge summarised that report on 14 October 2026. On 7 November 2026, Cleveland19 and later UPI reported that the Akron Zoo had to confirm its four African lions were still in their habitat after a false AI image of lions in the city circulated, following a routine 4 November safety drill. The New York Times (Eric Boodman), syndicated on 22 October 2026 by West Hawaii Today, described an AI-generated mantis photograph submitted to iNaturalist that briefly looked like a new species; DongA Science on 18 October attributed a 16 October New York Times report of the same case. Autocomplete on 12 November 2026 still offered phrases such as “ai wildlife photos”, “ai animal photos”, “ai generated wildlife images” and “ai generated animals realistic”. Individual posts we read on X that day about the Akron Zoo and the Russia bear story had modest counts, which we disclose with the links on this page.

Often not. A messy splash of a bear in a river can be a real photograph, and a tidy lioness in golden grass can be generated. Clues such as too-even trees, a magazine-cover pose or very regular spots help on a still image, but they are hints, not proof, and they fade once a photo is cropped, filtered or re-shared.

No. TimeBinder is not a tool for identifying generated media, and it cannot tell you whether AI made a file. A TimeBind shows that an exact file existed no later than a recorded time and that a copy you hold still matches it. That is useful when you can say “here is this file, recorded by this time,” not when you need to know how the picture was made.

Your score is worked out in your browser. This page sends a few anonymous events to our analytics, such as the quiz being finished with a score band, never your name or email.

Keep the original file unedited, and make a TimeBind of it when you take or finish it. Later, a copy that still matches the fingerprint is the same file, and the record shows it existed no later than the recorded time. It does not show who took the photo or that the animal was really there. Read how to prove a photo is not AI for the honest limits.