How to identify AI photos

People are being fooled by AI images - fake pictures of Donald Trump, the Pope and Elon Musk have spread through the media. People are being catfished with AI images. AI even won a worldwide SONY photography contest!

We humans need to learn to recognize these fake images, so Tony Northrpu teaches YOU how to spot them.

0:00 AI won a Photography Contest
0:20 The Toupee Falacy
0:51 Fingers & Toes
2:51 Body Shape
3:43 Skin Texture
5:05 Bad Text
6:05 Impossible Lighting
6:58 Mismatched Clothing
7:44 Inconsistent Depth-of-Field
8:34 Bad Background Details
9:44 Celebrities Acting Ridiculous
11:42 Beware False Positives
13:21 Integrity Validation
13:56 AI Images used in Fraud
14:40 Summary

[ianroe]

In my opinion, the most interesting thing about this whole AI thing is not whether it will effectively ruin the integrity of the online photography space, because I think that's absolutely inevitable at this point. It seems certain that it will improve to a point that spotting the differences will be extremely difficult. I think the most interesting thing will be to see how many photographers handle the reality that they need to start photographing only for themselves, and not for an online audience who may start to doubt whether the images are even real anymore. Of course, this excludes photographers whose jobs are to capture reality for others such as private event photographers.

[MauriceSchurink]

Alternative title "How to identify AI photos for the coming few months"

[trueatfalse]

9:16 also look at the left wheel on the right picture. it looks totally weird and doesn't fit into perspective at all.

[RandumbTech]

It’s so depressing. It’s already nearly impossible to tease out fact from fiction - this is going to make it even harder.

[rodiali]

Great video, their AI really nails the lighting. kahma is perfect for dating profile photos.

[OctoBooze]

It really hurts everyone, not just pro photographers cause fakes are incredibly easy to create and fool people with, the amount of misinfo will only keep increasing. The absolute post truth era is upon us, can't trust anything you see anymore. Not even seemingly innocent photographers cause I'm sure it's incredibly tempting to sneak a few generated images to pad up portfolios. It's good that people are critical of these things nowadays but I have to really hate what this tech does to overall health of all forms of media. The cons greatly outweigh the pros imo.

[dj_laundry_list]

Inconsistent depth of field alternate interpretation: AI has mastered tilt-shift without us even knowing it. That's almost certainly wrong because there is probably little tilt-shift training data, but let's acknowledge that the plane of focus doesn't have to match that of the film/sensor

[robinschaeffer]

Photography didn't kill painting, but rather allowed it to expand into places it hadn't gone before. A.I. won't kill photography, but will impact some of the things it is used for. A painted portrait is different than a photographic one, and an A.I. portrait will be different than either.

[Triplounet]

Most of these flaws could be tweak in "photoshop". Combine that with the fact that most "average"no photograph people watch a picture less than 3 seconds.
Wonder how it will go in the futur.

[bmwohl]

Thanks so much, Tony, for your hints for now (April, 2023) and your warning about fakes to come. It kind of reminds me of how the fake Rolexes keep getting better and better and some fakes now are made better than real Rolexes of 20 or 30 years ago. Your and Chelsea's AI series have been top notch.

[AndrewOzete-uifs]

Interesting to hear the comment about Video AI still much harder. In 1966, Robert Heinlein published his novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Over 55 years ago, Heinlein had a character that was an AI becoming self-aware. At one point it created an avatar for itself for video calling that looked like a real person. The other characters were talking about how that would be impossible to do.

[johng]

Unless its an artsy-fartsy contest that doesn't matter, I believe ALL photo entries need to have the meta data proven.

[thaliasnow]

Thanks for sharing Tony! Wow, it's kind of unbelievable how much the world has changed since I picked up my first photography book written by Tony & Chelsea...these are strange times...
I'm glad Tony and Chelsea are still actively putting out so much good content, thank you both and wish you all the best!

[gregdarroch]

This is one of the most interesting photography videos I’ve seen in a long time. Love it!

[Hitogata]

One more sign you didn't mention, but I noticed it happens a lot, including in some of the example images in this video, is the eyes! The iris is always perfectly circular, but AI doesn't know... yet...

[lifeonearth]

i dont want to be a part of this ai world. nothing is ever going to be the same again..

[robs-journeys]

I dub that thumbnail "Nightmare Tony"

[brentfader]

If you look closely at the left eye vs the right eye, you will see issues typically with the left eye. Also, if you look closely at the jewelry chain lines around the neckline. Version 5 is improving but it still has trouble with these two areas.

[Archontasil]

PHOTO-GRAPHY literally means LIGHT IMAGE. You need to capture light in order for an image to be called photography. I used to draw stick figures with magnifying glass when i was a kid, that's still fall under the term photography way more than AI generated Image.

[mxlunab]

This is a whole mess and even in its infancy the repercussions are already terrible. In 5 years, we'll be living in a world where we'll need forensics experts to tell us what's real.

One thing that concerns me is that AI is entering photography's tools and we are giving it space in our workflow, allowing for unrealistic scenarios, nonsensical lighting, unrealistic human features to take over the audience's preference. For example, the AI denoise filters / programs - they create this waxy look to the images that is absolutely unreal yet I don't see a single photographer criticizing the technology. I fear that one day cameras will come with AI baked in to the system (as it already happens with smartphones - see Samsung's moon shots) and we will have to start using old gear if we want to photograph something real.