Spotting Low-Effort AI Artwork Before It Reaches Your Garments
By The Velocity Wear Team
Generated artwork now turns up in supplier presentations, freelance deliverables and stock libraries without being labelled. That is not automatically a problem — a good result is a good result. The problem is low-effort output being passed through unchecked, because a flaw that is invisible on a screen is permanent on 300 garments.
The obvious tells
- **Hands, teeth and ears.** Still unreliable, still the fastest check on anything with a figure in it.
- **Text.** Generated lettering is very often subtly malformed. Any word in an image deserves a character-by-character read.
- **Broken symmetry.** Logos, badges, crests and anything with a mirrored structure will frequently be slightly different on each side.
- **Impossible construction.** Straps that go nowhere, seams that do not meet, a zip that changes direction. Common on garment renders specifically.
The expensive tells
These are the ones that survive a quick look and fail in production.
- 1**Detail that dissolves under magnification.** Zoom to 400%. Real illustration stays crisp; generated detail becomes soft mush that has no structure. This is what makes a print look blurry even though the file was "big enough".
- 2**Edges with no decision.** Semi-transparent, feathered boundaries everywhere. On screen it reads as depth. On fabric it is a halo or a scatter of stray dots.
- 3**Colour counts in the hundreds** where the design appears to have six. Open the file and check the histogram. A design that looks flat but contains three hundred shades cannot be screen printed as drawn.
- 4**No source files.** A designer who worked on it has layered files, paths and versions. A flattened PNG with no working file behind it usually means there was no work behind it.
A two-minute check before you approve anything
Zoom to 400% and look at the smallest details. Read every character of text. Check both sides of anything symmetrical. Put the file over a bright colour to expose the background. Ask for the vector or layered source. Reverse image search the final composition.
That sequence catches almost everything, and it takes less time than reading the email the file came attached to.
What to ask for instead of complaining
If you find these problems, the useful request is not "this looks AI-generated". It is specific: supply this as vector, flatten to six spot colours, give me hard edges with no feathering, redraw the type in a real typeface. Those are answerable requests, and a competent designer will deliver them whether or not a model was involved at the start.
We run these checks on incoming artwork as part of quoting, and raise anything that will not reproduce well before production rather than after. It is the cheapest quality control in the process — and the only stage where the answer can still be "let us fix the file".
