Harmy said:
@darklordoftech: Yes, exactly.
@MaximRecoil: I simply disagree with this - people weren't used to seing CGI dinosaurs, so they seemed much more real back then, than the seem now - I know this, because I experienced it and my dad said this as well, last time we watched Jurassic Park. I just watched the 1st Harry Potter movie yesterday and I could spot things being obviously CGI, where I never spotted them before. And the LOTR example is a very good one as well - when I first saw those movies, they seemed flawless (visually anyway) and now, I can see all kinds of things looking fake and CGIed, though I can still see less CGI fakeness there than in the Hobbit movies, because there is simply less CGI - like Neverar says, people just learned to recognize the signs of something being CGI but in the early days, most people thought it was photo-realistic. You may be the exception to that but not the rule.
Sure, some CGI always looked bad (CGI Jabba is a great example) but most CGI definitely seems much more fake now, than it did when it was created.
Anecdotes can't establish anything one way or another. "Confirmation bias" is the biggest potential problem with anecdotes of this nature. A controlled study of some sort could give meaningful results. This would have to involve people who have never seen the CGI in e.g., Jurassic Park and therefore have no preconceived notions about it.
As for "learning to recognize the signs of something being CGI": logically, there should be no learning process required. Those signs are simply differences from reality, and reality is something that pretty much everyone is extremely familiar with.
As for my own anecdotes, I have none where I once thought a certain case of CGI looked real or good but now I think it looks fake or bad. I'm too old to have seen any photorealistic attempts at CGI as a kid, though that could change things (i.e., a child's brain isn't even close to being fully developed yet, and they are inherently more credulous than adults as a general rule). Another thing that can change things is the quality and resolution of the picture and the display, i.e., CGI that looks good on a VHS tape or even a DVD displayed on a 15 kHz CRT isn't necessarily going to look good at far more revealing levels of resolution/quality.