What to look at, and what failure looks like
- Skin: over-smoothed to a plastic finish, or a pore or wrinkle pattern that repeats across the surface.
- Hair: strands merging into a solid mass, strands dissolving into the background instead of ending, hair passing through clothing without interacting.
- Fabric: stripes that change width, checks that do not line up across a fold, prints or logos that warp around the body.
- Edges: a boundary between object and background that blurs, melts, or develops a faint halo instead of staying defined.
Why the edges fail
The model reconstructs patterns at a fixed level of detail and has no separate representation of "this is hair" versus "this is the wall behind it." At a boundary where it is uncertain which region a pixel belongs to, it averages the two, and averaging is what produces a blur, a halo, or a merged mass. The same fixed-detail reconstruction explains repeating texture: when the model needs more surface than it has distinct patterns for, it reuses one.
Do not over-read smoothness
Beauty retouching, noise reduction, and heavy JPEG compression all smooth skin and soften edges in genuine photographs. Over-smoothing alone is weak evidence. It becomes meaningful when it appears alongside a repeating pattern, a dissolving boundary, or one of the anatomy or lighting clues from the earlier pages.