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  • 5 of these 10 photos are AI-generated — can you spot them?

    5 of these 10 photos are AI-generated — can you spot them?

    AI-generated images are unreal at this point. Indistinguishable from the real thing, easy to create, and accessible to anyone, there is little wonder why so-called AI slop runs rampant.

    It’s not all slop, mind. Not all AI-generated images are the next round of “shrimp Jesus” or featured on this week’s trending “Insane AI Slop” pages.

    In that, I’ve got a little challenge for you. In the following ten images, five are AI. But which ones are which? Check out each image and the prompt used to create it, and let us know if you could spot all of our AI-generated images in the comments below.

    10

    A macro shot of a ginger cat

    Capturing a cat’s favorite state: sleep

    Prompt

    An extreme close-up, high-resolution photograph of a sleeping ginger tabby cat. The cat’s face fills the frame, eyes closed peacefully, with soft orange fur marked by subtle stripes. Fine whiskers extend outward, and the nose is a soft pink. The cat rests its head on a pale fabric surface, with one paw curled nearby. Warm, intimate, macro-style pet photography with natural lighting and rich texture detail.

    9

    The snowy street in Brooklyn

    It’s a classic winter scene

    Prompt

    A quiet residential street in Brooklyn during a heavy snowfall. Rows of classic brownstone townhouses line both sides, with stoops, railings, and window details covered in fresh snow. Soft yellow streetlamps glow through the falling snowflakes. A single person walks down the center of the snow-blanketed street with a small dog, leaving faint tracks. Bare winter trees arch above the street, and the Brooklyn Bridge rises faintly in the snowy haze in the distance. Soft, overcast lighting, serene, cinematic, high-resolution winter scene.

    8

    A young child drawing with crayons

    Not quite keeping it all on the paper

    Prompt

    A young toddler sitting at a small wooden table in a bright, cozy room, drawing on white paper with colorful crayons. The child wears denim overalls over a striped long-sleeve shirt, with a few smudges of crayon on their cheek and nose. They concentrate intently while making squiggly lines. Soft natural light comes through a window with sheer curtains in the background. Out-of-focus toys, blocks, and a teddy bear sit on the floor behind them. Warm, gentle, homey atmosphere, shallow depth of field, high-resolution lifestyle photograph.

    7

    Beaches and cliffs on a summer’s day

    Heading to a secret beach?

    Prompt

    A bright, clear summer day along a rugged coastal path overlooking turquoise-blue water. A dirt trail winds through green grassy cliffs and flowering shrubs, leading toward a small sandy cove nestled between rocky headlands. Jagged dark rocks meet the sea below, where patches of shallow aqua water contrast with deeper blue. Rolling green hills rise in the distance beneath a cloudless blue sky. A few hikers walk along the path near a small stone building. High-resolution coastal landscape photography with vivid colors and crisp natural light.

    6

    A rainy night in an Asian city

    So vibrant, so wet

    Prompt

    A vibrant, rainy night street scene in an East Asian city. Crowds of people walk under umbrellas along a wet, reflective sidewalk lined with bright neon signs and warmly lit storefronts. On the right, a traditional-style building glows with rows of red lanterns, casting golden light onto the street. On the left, a line of trees arches over the walkway, their glossy leaves lit by streetlights. Motorbikes park along the curb, and traffic moves slowly through the rain. Reflections of red, yellow, and blue lights shimmer on the pavement. Dense atmosphere, busy urban energy, rich colors, high-resolution night photography.

    5

    A smartly dressed woman in a hotel room

    Heading out for business or brunch?

    Prompt

    A softly lit, modern bedroom with minimalist decor and warm neutral tones. A woman stands near a full-length mirror, barefoot on a textured grey rug, wearing a loose cream blouse and dark tailored trousers. She holds a folded blue sweater in one arm and looks downward thoughtfully. Behind her, sheer white curtains diffuse natural light across the room. A wooden console table with simple books and a ceramic vase sits against the wall. The bed in the foreground has neatly arranged grey and beige bedding. Calm, elegant, contemporary interior photography with subtle warm lighting and shallow depth of field.

    4

    The sun setting over the bay

    It’s golden hour

    Prompt

    A stunning coastal sunset overlooking a calm bay. The sun sits low on the horizon, casting a golden path of reflected light across the water. In the midground, a small rocky island rises from the sea, while distant headlands fade softly into the warm evening haze. In the foreground, a terrace with wooden tables, chairs, and glass railings sits above stone walls. A white building labeled “MOUNT’S BAY SAILING CLUB” stands to the right, with a tall mast beside it. A few people sit outside enjoying the sunset. Warm, golden-hour lighting, clear sky, tranquil seaside atmosphere, high-resolution photography.

    3

    Close up with the ship’s bell

    Every ship needs a bell

    Prompt

    A close-up, high-resolution photograph of an aged bronze ship’s bell with a weathered green-blue patina. The engraved text “ANDALUC…” is prominently visible in raised lettering around the upper band. Below the text, ornate decorative floral patterns wrap around the bell. Sunlight highlights the textured metal surface, revealing scratches, oxidation, and uneven coloration. The background is softly blurred, showing hints of wooden ship railings and indistinct people, giving a historic maritime atmosphere. Shallow depth of field, warm daylight, crisp macro-style detail.

    2

    A young couple taking a selfie on the beach

    Capturing those precious moments

    Prompt

    A joyful couple taking a selfie together on a sandy beach at sunset. They stand close, smiling warmly, with the woman in a light, flowy dress and the man in a casual T-shirt and shorts. The sun is low on the horizon, casting golden light across the waves and wet sand. Soft pastel skies fade from orange to pink. Palm trees line the distant shoreline, and gentle surf rolls in behind them. Warm, romantic, candid travel-photography style, high resolution, natural lighting, relaxed and happy atmosphere.

    1

    A courtyard at twilight

    Inviting with dark skies

    Prompt

    A serene twilight scene in an old courtyard lined with long, whitewashed buildings. Warm wall-mounted lights cast dramatic triangular beams upward along the textured walls, highlighting arched windows with dark metal grilles. The ground is a wide, empty dirt or gravel surface leading toward additional rustic buildings in the distance. Overhead, the sky is a deep, moody blue with heavy clouds, while silhouetted trees frame the background. Soft ambient glow from nearby houses adds warmth to the far end of the courtyard. High-resolution night photography with rich contrast, atmospheric lighting, and quiet, timeless charm.

    These are the AI images—did you guess everything?

    The prompts used for each image were all generated by ChatGPT, while the AI images were generated using Google’s Nano Banana. Did you manage to spot all of the AI images? It’s clear that some are easier to spot than others!

    Image

    Caption

    AI or Human

    A macro shot of a ginger cat

    📸

    The snowy street in Brooklyn

    🤖

    A young child drawing with crayons

    🤖

    Beaches and cliffs on a summer’s day

    📸

    A rainy night in an Asian city

    📸

    A smartly dressed woman in a hotel room

    🤖

    The sun setting over the bay

    🤖

    Close up with the ship’s bell

    📸

    A young couple taking a selfie on the beach

    🤖

    A courtyard at twilight

    📸

    Let us know in the comments how many you got right, and how you spotted the AI shots!

  • A week with ChatGPT Atlas convinced me to uninstall it

    A week with ChatGPT Atlas convinced me to uninstall it

    There’s been a wave of new “AI-powered” browsers lately, and I’ve tried pretty much all of them. Most of them promise a smarter, faster, more automated browsing experience, and end up feeling like the same browser with a chatbot glued on top.

    I genuinely thought OpenAI would be the one doing something different. So when the new ChatGPT Atlas browser launched, I gave it a full week as my daily browser. But just like Dia, Comet, and the rest, it left me disappointed. After seven days of trying to make it work, I ended up uninstalling it. And my search for a browser that actually feels fresh continues.

    Cool AI features don’t guarantee a better browser

    AI for the sake of AI isn’t enough

    Image by Raghav
    Credit: Raghav Sethi/MakeUseOf

    ChatGPT Atlas is pitched as the next leap in browsing, in the same category as things like Perplexity’s Comet. And on paper, sure, it sounds impressive. The browser pipes every search through ChatGPT, it has a sidebar that follows you from site to site, and it can even “act” on your behalf using its Agent mode. It is the same checklist of AI browser features we have seen a dozen times already. But once you use it for more than a week, the excitement wears off surprisingly fast. Because here is the thing: AI alone is not enough to make a browser better.

    Right now, every new browser (Dia, Comet, etc.) is doing the exact same trick. They take Chromium and layer a chatbot on top of it. That does not make the core experience any smarter, any faster, or any more enjoyable. It just adds another UI element to something that was already fine. After a while, it starts to feel repetitive. I am not switching browsers just to have another place to ask an LLM questions. I can already do that anywhere.

    Arc understood this. Before it added AI, it came up with genuinely useful improvements to how you work in a browser. Vertical tabs that made navigation feel cleaner, or Spaces that helped separate your work and personal browsing. Even when Arc added AI, the focus wasn’t on having conversations with an LLM. It was about making the browser itself smarter, such as automatically organizing your tabs for you.

    With Atlas, there is none of that. It feels like the whole browser exists just to say, “Hey, look, AI is everywhere now.” And that is where I check out. If a browser wants me to switch, it has to rethink the fundamentals. I am tired of having AI shoved down my throat. Everyone has that. I want to see something genuinely new again.

    Agent mode feels slow and underwhelming

    I ended up fixing its work anyway

    Credit: Amir Bohlooli / MakeUseOf

    The idea behind Agent mode is simple: instead of just answering your questions, the browser can actually do things for you. It can open sites, click through pages, fill forms, search for products, and supposedly complete tasks inside the browser without your input. On paper, that sounds like exactly where AI should be heading. A browser that does the boring steps for you.

    But in practice, Agent Mode feels slow and clumsy. It constantly trips over incredibly basic things. It sometimes fails to recognize that a page has a scroll bar, so it just sits there staring at the top of a page forever. Other times, it starts doing something and then gets stuck midway, like it forgot what the task even was. And when it does manage to complete something, it has this habit of drifting way off instructions, like it is improvising instead of following what you actually asked for.

    That is a huge problem, especially because Agent Mode is positioned as something that can help with everyday workflows, like adding items to your cart while shopping or filling data into forms. But if you eventually need to redo everything yourself anyway, what is the point of the agent being there at all?

    My breaking point was a simple task. I asked Agent Mode to take some data from a Google Sheets file and paste it into a table in Google Docs. A task that would have taken me ten seconds, maybe less. After over three minutes of watching it slowly move through menus, it finally “completed” the task. Except it didn’t paste the data. It created a summary of the sheet and generated a report explaining what it thought the sheet was about.

    And that is what makes Agent Mode frustrating. I could forgive it being slow if it were accurate. But in its current state, it’s wasting my time instead of saving it.

    There are some pretty major security risks

    OpenAI even admits there could be problems

    Credit: Amir Bohlooli / MakeUseOf

    The issue isn’t just that Agent Mode is unpredictable. When a browser is allowed to click, fill forms, and interact with websites on your behalf, the door opens to real security concerns. Because the agent reads the page to understand what to do, the page itself can influence the agent’s behavior.

    This is what’s known as prompt injection. A website can hide text that tells the agent to take a different action than what you asked for. So you might say something simple like, “Compare these two phones, and add the better one to my cart.” However, if the site has hidden instructions directing the agent to add the more expensive item to your cart or navigate elsewhere, the agent might actually follow those instructions instead.

    And because this whole concept of agentic browsing is still new, there isn’t a reliable, guaranteed way to prevent this yet. Even OpenAI openly notes on Atlas’ download page that using Agent Mode comes with risks and that you should be cautious.

    These are the last kinds of worries I want to have when I’m just trying to browse the web. If a feature isn’t consistent, and it might put my data or accounts at risk, the trade-off just doesn’t feel worth it.

    ChatGPT Atlas still hasn’t nailed the basics

    It’s Chromium with extra steps

    And this is where everything comes full circle. For all the talk about AI-first browsing, ChatGPT Atlas still struggles with the fundamentals. Strip away the ChatGPT sidebar and the agent features, and what you’re left with feels like a very plain Chromium browser. There’s no proper multi-profile support, no thoughtful tab management features, and not even something as simple as vertical tabs. That’s the part that makes the whole thing frustrating. In trying so hard to integrate LLMs into every corner of the browser, the basics have been ignored. Browsers are tools we spend hours on every day. The core experience has to be solid before you start layering on futuristic ideas. But Atlas feels like an AI layer sitting on top of something that could just as easily have been a Chrome extension. There’s almost no meaningful customization either. You can change your accent color, sure, that’s about it. Everything else feels unfinished, like the browser shipped before the foundation was actually ready. It needed more time, more polish, and more thought put into how people actually browse.

    Looking for something new again

    Safe to say I’ve stopped using Atlas entirely. My browser of choice used to be Arc, until it was replaced with Dia, which just never lived up to what made Arc special. So for now, I’ve taken temporary refuge in Chrome.

    It’s not exciting, but it doesn’t get in my way. I’m still hoping a browser comes along that actually rethinks how we browse instead of just adding an LLM everywhere. But until then, I’ll be waiting.