For as good as generative AI has gotten, simple visuals are what it recreates best. “It’s not that it struggles with tattoos, per se,” Farid says. “It’s that it struggles with details.” In other words, a wardrobe full of Dan Flashes shirts would arguably keep you just as protected as a tattoo sleeve.
There are also fewer people with visible ink than without—only 22% of people in the U.S. have more than one tattoo. That means the model training data set of people with tattoos is much smaller than the set of people without them, says Saetbyeol Leeyouk, a critical technologist and graduate student at MIT Media Lab whose work focuses on the intersection of ethics and AI.
But both Farid and Leeyouk say there is a big caveat here: We are talking about the capabilities these programs have right now in August 2026. If you’re going to say “tattoos make it harder for generative AI to recreate your likeness,” you have to end that sentence with “today,” Farid says. “Tomorrow, next week, next month, it’s going to get better. We know this.” Leeyouk agrees, saying “Eventually, [the tattoo issue] will be solved.”
For proof of this acceleration, Farid invites us all to remember the 2023 Will Smith eating spaghetti video, a nightmarish montage of vaguely Will Smith-shaped figures shoveling handfuls of pasta-like blobs into what could potentially pass as a human mouth if you were unfamiliar with the species. Less than three years later, a Reddit user generated an updated version that, as long as you aren’t looking too closely for a human soul behind the eyes, could definitely be a spaghetti commercial starring Will Smith.
These AI-generated videos are getting better because the programs are getting better at temporal coherence, which is a visual consistency between frames. “Temporal coherence has come from the fact that we’re not generating frame after frame after frame [to create a video,]” Farid explains. Rather than generating videos one still image at a time—Will Smith eating spaghetti is Eadweard Muybridge’s horse for the internet age—these newer programs can generate a short video clip all at once.
There are limits on how long those clips can be—Farid says about 10 to 15 seconds—which is why, for right now, your tattoos probably would get messed up in any longer generated video, which is just a bunch of short clips back to back. “If you have a fair number of [tattoos] and I made a video of you, they’d probably move a little bit from clip to clip,” he says.
But how much will that little bit of movement actually matter? Leeyouk points out that, particularly in the case of non-consensual sexual deepfakes (an area of research focus for her), “the purpose of that is not just the itself, but to humiliate the victim,” she says. Whether they got the shading on your neotraditional snake exactly right probably won’t matter much to you if your likeness is being stolen for a nefarious purpose.
