In popular AI communities such as Civit AI or PromptHero, prompts for realistic photos often include keywords like "hyper-realistic," "photorealistic," and "depth of field." But do these terms really enhance realism?

To conduct the test we test 20 keywords, each time appending them to two base prompts: "A realistic photo of a man, upper body, color" and "A realistic photo of a woman, upper body, color". The base prompts alone produced realistic images, but they were obviously AI Generated, with the skin looking a bit too smooth and the eyes a bit too perfect.

Our goal was to find out which keywords produce images that make you question for a moment if they are AI generated or not. This criterion was the basis for our image ratings.

For each keyword we generated 8 photos, 4 for each base prompt, and rated them on a scale of 1 to 3, with 1 being obviously AI generated and 3 being indistinguishable from a real photo.

Each keyword belongs to one of these categories: cinematic effects (depth of field, shallow focus, etc.), name ( a woman named jennifer, a man named joey), detailed (hyper-realistic, photorealistic, etc) and photography equipment (nikon d4s, lomography xprochrome film, etc)