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Even SynthID, Openai's latest watermarking technique can be somewhat reliably bypassed with a comfyui workflow that is just designed to repaint the picture.
In short, detection and watermarking are not currently winning. The quality bypassed human capabilities sometime early last year at least.
Spotting a fake used to mean spotting edits, such as a repeating background, a shadow in the wrong place, or artefacts around a pasted-in object. That worked because manipulated images usually started with a real photo, leaving clues behind.
AI-generated images are different. They’re created from scratch, with no original image underneath, so those kinds of editing mistakes often don’t exist.
Even this is out-of-date, thanks to edit-models. This is why 'replace her clothes with a micro-bikini' is a problem. The model also doesn't clone-tool from nearby in the same image, like us Photoshop Phriday veterans. They're fully capable of generating an image from scratch, but replace just enough to blend into a given photo.
An image used to be reasonable proof that something happened.
Ehhhh.
TL;DR the same way you detect lies, be skeptical of untrustworthy sources and think critically.
The real answer is that there isn't always any way to tell if an image is AI generated, and as time passes while there may always be tells for poorly done images the percentage of generated images displaying those tells will continue to rapidly shrink.
You can only find signs an image was AI generated in images that display those signs. That doesn't mean you're weeding them all out, or even 1% of them.
Even if you spend a month looking at every tiny detail of an image, unless you physically witnessed it's creation or it's something with known provenance (i.e. the Mona Lisa) you can never say for certain that it is not AI generated.
It's about as ridiculous as "is it Photoshopped?" or "Is it airbrushed?"
You can't tell
That doesn't mean no one else can.
The vast majority of people can't tell a male chick from a female chick, which is super important for egg farmers.
But, some people can.
And even tho they can't explain how they can tell, we know they can tell, because chicks grow up into hens and roosters. And they can tell almost instantly
Stop thinking everyone is exactly like you, no one is like anyone else, we're all snowflakes with innumerable avenues of variation.
Ah yes, the "golden ear". And how much do the services of one of these magically gifted witch-finders cost?
Well, now I just think there's two things you don't understand...
Distrust the situation, not just the picture.
Yes.
I remember the r/isitAI subreddit being chockablock with,
This hot, successful 25-year-old Korean business woman is totally in love with grandfather in Des Moines after she accidentally texted him; her webcam has been down for the year they've been talking, so they've never videoed, but here is her picture.
Is it AI?
I feel like those were usually situations where the person was like, “My grandfather won’t believe this is a scam no matter how much we plead with him. Can you find any obvious AI tells in this picture that I can show him?”
That makes sense.
Probably wouldn't make a difference. It's more likely that someone has six fingers than the scenario here is true.
It's still weird people don't just use spider tingles...
We're pattern recognition machines and we don't need to conciously be aware of all the signs of AI.
It would be like trying to teach an adult how to ride a bike by telling them what muscles to constrict in what order.
With enough time and effort it might work, but it's the worst way to learn how to ride a bike and anyone that learns and only rides a bike that way is gonna fucking suck compared to someone who offloaded the specifics to their unconscious mind and just gives general commands like "turn left".
Tldr:
You can tell when it's AI, because of the way it is.
Trying to get nity gritty and pick out specifics isn't sustainable long term. The only downside is false negatives from everyone needlessly upscaling pictures, but those would happen no matter what.
If that were true, there wouldn't be so many comments saying they are 100% sure it is AI on 10 year old images and videos.
You can't tell, because AI is designed to be indistinguishable from regular images, until you look for clues up close. And even then those clues are rapidly disappearing the more advanced the AI becomes.
You can’t tell,
No, I'm saying I can tell...
And I'm saying that not everyone can, because I understand human variation...
You are saying that you can't tell, and you are saying that no one else can tell because people can only do things you can do...
Spider tingles are good, but you need some training.
Like the lesson of "Blink" isn't that we are all amazing intuitive and we should always trust our instincts over our intellect, but that people who TRAIN their intuition with their intellect have insights they might not be able to express.
It would be good to keep a library of older, more obvious AI images to analyze and train people on.
Because people who pick out forgeries explain how they could tell...
And forgers paid attention to those things.
Same with AI, people going on about six fingers means we can't just count fingers anymore.
Anything quantifiable, will be what the slop experts focus on fixing.
We're just gonna be left with the ineffable, a collection of a whole bunch of small signs were not consciously aware of and even if we try to describe we're just coming up with post fact rationalizations.
Like, if you showed me an AI pic right now, I'm fully confident I could tell
But if you asked me to explain how, I'd just be making shit up like an AI would. I might say real signs that I consciously noticed, but anyone walking around with a checklist will at best gain a temporary ability that the slop will out pace.
It's gotta be "gut feeling". But because most people don't understand what those actually are, they refuse to trust it. But I bet they won't ignore a reaction to duck if someone throws a wrench at their face.
It's the same thing, your mind/body deciding something without going thru the hassle of your conscious brain. It's a bandwidth thing, you don't need to "see the math" because that would take too long. You just gotta trust the flashing red light that says "this isn't real".
The fakes are also rapidly getting better. A reliable detector and careful wallet-based-voting is needed to fight this bullshait.
So how do I "just use spider tingles"?
To me this sounds like you are saying "just ride the bike, even five year olds can do it".
Are you asking me how to trust your gut?
Or are you saying your subconscious is bad at recognizing patterns?
Or that you're not in touch with yourself in general?
I'm willing to help, I just can't tell what you need help with bro
Yes to all of your questions. How can I trust my gut? Years ago, when AI generated images were far worse than today, I did a test on a web page that showed some AI-generated and some real images. And I was really bad. Nowadays I don't have a chance.
Even here in the Fediverse I often don't recognise AI-generated images until someone points out mismatched shadows or some other "obvious" errors.
And I was really bad. Nowadays I don’t have a chance.
I mean, you might just not be good at it, and this is like asking how to be 7 feet tall so you can play in the NBA.
That's how variation works, there's likely other aspects you're good at and others aren't.
Like I said in another comment tho, it's not like you can learn what to look for, because the things you're conciously looking for are the same things the people making it are aware of.
The only way to come close to "learning" is to just look at a shit ton of AI pictures while reminding yourself over and over "this is AI". Like, for a while, maybe 30-60 minutes at a time. Do the same thing for real pictures but repeating "this is real" as an internal monologue.
You're just hammering a label unto your various subconscious processes until they start shoving everything into that binary label system. Either "ai" or "real".
But again, human variation. There's other reasons to jog than beating Usain Bolts 100m dash time, you might not ever be great at it, you might not even see much improvement.
But doing that enough would eventually make you better at picking up all the little signs that others are noticing. It's exploiting how our minds work and want to see patterns.
I've tried to teach my father about all this, he got fleeced for $500. I've spent HOURS with him to no avail. He still believes every fucking thing. It's infuriating. The situation, his capacity to learn, state of humanity just fucking the shit out of one another mentally...
Humans ruin everything.