Guides
Real or AI quiz: how to get a better score
Why most people miss clips in a real-or-AI video quiz, the habits that improve your guesses, and what your score says about spotting AI video in real life.
Video Verifier team · · 4 min read
To score better on a real-or-AI video quiz, stop hunting for glitches and start watching how things move: the background, where objects touch, and whether the camera behaves like a real one. Two common ways to lose points are calling beautiful real footage "AI" and smooth AI footage "real". A few habits fix a lot of that, though nobody gets every clip right by eye.
Our Real or AI quiz is a good place to practise. Here's how it works and how to do better at it.
How the quiz works
You watch short, silent clips, half of them real and half made by AI tools like Sora, Veo, Kling, Runway, Hailuo and PixVerse. After each guess you see the answer and what our video model said about that clip.
Three things make it harder than it sounds:
- The clips were picked for looking realistic, before we looked at how our detector scored them. Don't expect easy cartoon fakes.
- None of them were in our model's training data. They come from the held-out test set.
- The sound is removed, so one of the most useful clues in real life, the voice and the room, is gone.
The real clips come from people who shared them on Wikimedia Commons under free licences, and every clip is credited on the quiz page.
Why people get clips wrong
These are common traps.
"It's too beautiful, so it must be AI"
Real nature and travel footage can be stunning, especially when it's well shot. People see a perfect waterfall or a golden-hour street and assume a computer made it. Our own model has the same weakness: polished stock footage is its hardest real case, and only 55.4% of the Pexels stock clips in our tests were read as real.
"It's shaky, so it must be real"
Handheld wobble used to be a sign of a real phone. Generators can now imitate it. Shake on its own proves nothing.
"I didn't see a mistake"
Modern clips often have no mistake you can point to in a few seconds. Absence of a glitch isn't evidence of a real video.
Deciding in the first second
First impressions lean heavily on style and lighting, which AI has become very good at. The giveaways, when there are any, tend to show up over time.
Six habits that improve your score
- Watch the clip twice. The first time for the overall feeling, the second time for one specific thing.
- Look behind the subject. Background people, animals and traffic get less of the generator's attention. Watch for anyone who freezes, merges with someone else or walks without getting anywhere.
- Watch the contact points. Feet on the ground, paws on a branch, hands on a railing. Do they press, slip and cast shadows the way real ones do?
- Ask why things move. In real footage, motion has causes: wind moves leaves, a person reacts to something. In AI clips, things often move nicely for no reason.
- Watch the camera. Real cameras refocus, adjust to light and bump slightly at the end of a movement. AI cameras often glide.
- Follow one detail. Pick a pattern, a sign or a piece of jewellery and check it stays the same throughout.
Our guide to the 12 signs of AI video has more on each of these.
Here are two clips like the ones in the quiz, from the same test set. In the first card, a kangaroo standing in a park with others behind it, made with Kling 1.5; our video model scored it 99% AI. In the second, ospreys on a nest platform, a real video from Wikimedia Commons; our video model scored it 99% real. Both are wildlife, and only one was ever filmed.
Video is likely
AI-made
Video is likely
Real
What your score really tells you
If you scored well, good: you're paying attention to the right things. But remember the quiz clips are short and silent, and you knew some of them were AI. In real life, a video arrives with a caption that tells you what to believe, and you're usually scrolling, not studying.
If you scored badly, don't be hard on yourself. AI video has improved quickly, and our explainer on why AI videos look so real now covers what changed.
Either way, the most useful lesson isn't "I can spot fakes". It's knowing when your eyes aren't enough, and checking the source and running a scan instead.
Make it a game with friends and family
The quiz gives you a score link you can share, and your friends see your score with a challenge to beat it. It's a light way to start a conversation with relatives who forward a lot of videos. Talking about fakes is easier once everyone, you included, has been fooled by a clip or two.
For a look at what the detector behind the quiz gets right and wrong across many more clips, see our accuracy page.
From quiz to real life
The quiz shows you the answer straight away. Real videos don't. When one matters, paste its link on the home page for a free Quick Scan, no sign-up needed. You'll get an answer in under a minute for most videos, with the reasons behind it.
Quick answers
Is the quiz free?
Yes. It's free and needs no sign-up.
Are the clips in the quiz from the detector's training data?
No. They come from the test set our video model never saw in training. The score shown after each clip is our video model alone; a full scan adds several more checks.
What's a good score?
Any score is useful if it shows you which kinds of clips fool you. Pay attention to the ones you got wrong: that's where your blind spots are.