How to Detect AI Images (and why it doesn't matter)

It is a very weird moment and it is really important that a lot of people have both the kinds of skills that give them good signals for when to get suspicious AND strong abilities to figure out whether things are real or not.

Both of those things, IMO, are getting harder and harder. Platforms (and creators) succeed by giving you content that you /won't/ be suspicious of, and we have more and more tools for fooling the BS detectors that people have developed, requiring new BS detector upgrades constantly!! IT'S A MESS!!!

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[zoltannyikos]

The saddest part is that the pattern recognition already fails. There have been many examples of regular artists being accused of AI simply because their art style has some of that "softness" that AI generated pictures often have.

[Crunchy_Punch]

Applying Step 2 to Hank's background has got me thinking he could be AI too. Shelves jutting off at odd angles. Some books are stacked horizontally. And why is there a hammer just suspended there?

[redliberte]

“If we vibe with it, we don’t scrutinize it” is the most 2024 way possible to simply explain confirmation bias.

[alixila]

Something really similar happened with a musical artist I like recently. He used some fan-submitted art for his New Year's concert merch and some people called him out and said it was AI-generated. Unfortunately, it looks like he was lied to by the person who submitted the art and he had to apologize. I did think it was an interesting topic for Hank to discuss once I heard about it. The dishonesty in both stories is the bigger issue to deal with. Paying reputable artists in either situation is the solution.

[solsticesun]

Digital artist here. After fourteen years I'm finally pretty happy with what I can make, but it feels bittersweet due to the recent AI advances. How can you compete with something that creates what you do, for free and instantly?

I've seen AI art booths in the wild at conventions and local art festivals. My reference image search results are completely clogged with AI stock photos. Just last night, my partner showed me a new game with an entire catalog of AI generated characters. And these large companies, that truly can afford the real deal, keep getting caught using AI instead of paying artists.

Right now people are still outraged, but I fear that not too far in the future people will move on. Even as someone who looks at art every day, I'm fooled frequently; I can hardly expect others to have the stamina to scrutinize everything they see.

[LaterMimmi]

Wacom, the manufacturer of drawing tablets for artists, were also caught using AI generated art in their promotional material recently. And they also stated that they had purchased the art from a third party who had indicated that the art was not AI generated.

I think we are reaching a point where all art that is circulated/sold under the notion that a human made it should be supported by some proof that it was - perhaps a photo of the initial sketch or a timelapse of the drawing process. Everyone doesn't need to see it, but the companies who buy the art certainly need to have it - they can't keep blaming third parties forever, they are responsible for not properly vetting their partners.

[GrahamCrannell]

I, for one, would welcome an hour-long hankschannel video about why AI art should maybe pump the brakes. My degree is in ML/AI and even I kinda feel the same way Hank does. It's super cool tech: we nailed the "could". But maybe we need to give the "should" a little more consideration.

[niagargoyle]

I recently came across a social media post that said, "It's funny how recognizing AI art nowadays is just the same old rules as recognizing the fae in old tales: 'Count the fingers, count the knuckles, count the teeth, check the shadows...' ... and under NO circumstances should you make deals with their kind."

[matthewlaing]

I have an uncomfortable feeling that at some point in the future, we're going to reach a position where no one believes a person is real unless they've actually met them in person.

How long before a new famous person that is seen on screens is revealed to have a completely AI appearance and voice?

[angellacanfora]

As a disabled stock landscape photographer who has been working for years to shore up my portfolios over at Adobe, Getty, Dreamstime and Alamy, I've watched my income stream fizzle within the last year. Mere words can't convey my grief knowing that this income that I was counting on in my Golden Years, will be virtually nonexistent thanks to AI.

[joa]

I think what troubles me most about this AI generation craze, where we’re becoming swamped by endless, mass produced machine imagery and text, is the lack of curiosity it enables. I love art and fiction because I care about the people I share a planet with.

That’s not me bragging or trying to position myself as enlightened, it’s just fundamentally the reason I get engaged in a painting/movie/novel/etc. Because they connect me, however briefly, to the inner lives of their creators. I learn about my fellow human beings: their aches, their obsessions, their dreams, their cultures. The most enthralling works of art can take us into someone else’s world, building empathy by showing us a side of life we may never have experienced otherwise.

But even comparatively mundane, everyday art, right down to elevator music or cartoons on shop window advertisements; the fact that those have some sort of story behind them, came out of someone’s brain, can make them interesting.

With so much AI art, though, it often seems like not even the person who typed in the prompt and pressed ‘generate’ spent much time looking at the image (or else they might have attempted to fix up the bit where the subjects arm fuses with the bicycle handle, or the pedestrian in the background with no face and three boobs). So regardless of how impressive it might be visually or technically, I’m kind of left with no reason to spend much time looking at it beyond ‘oooh, pretty colours’ or ‘hehe, I found a mistake’.

Why should I care, if the person who ‘created’ it didn’t care, and probably won’t be able to identify it in a lineup of similar pictures in a weeks time? And that’s if there even was anyone typing the prompt in the first place. Maybe someone just left it on overnight to spit out whatever, and in the morning it was all automatically posted to DeviantART without the owner of the account even looking at it.

We can make literally infinite amounts of these images (well, at least until all the CO2 emissions catch up with us), but I don’t feel compelled at all to try and look at all of them because I already know what they’ll be like. They’ll be fine. They’ll be pretty. They’ll be generally aesthetically pleasing representations of whatever their prompt was. And they’ll sit on a big pile, filed under ‘oil paintings of anime girls in the rain wearing blue coats standing next to tigers’ or whatever, and no one will come back to look at them because they can always just press a button and generate eleventy bazillion more ‘oil paintings of anime girls in the rain wearing blue coats standing next to tigers’.

It just removes so much humanity and flattens art and creativity into something so impersonal and commodified. It lets us form bubbles around ourselves by rinsing out the influence of other people, other perspectives, other lives. Which is such a valuable tool if you’re in the business of controlling and manipulating the public. And it’s also just boring.

I don’t care if you’re not the best at drawing! Draw anyway! I want to see it! Because only you would draw it that way, and chances are you’ll have a story about it.

[laurentiuvladutmanea]

Honestly, I am of the opinion that we need to do more then just scrutinize images, for the reason you mentioned(the fact it will get better), but that we in fact need to put regulations on the training process itself.

[meh.]

So I have this argument against AI art that's not very common - I've looked to see if other people make it and I haven't seen it much - and if you happen across this comment, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

The gist of my argument is this: Artists make creative decisions when they make art. And not just a few decisions, either. The more experience you have making a large creative work, like say, a film, or a novel, or an album, the more you realize thousands of decisions get made in the process of creating it. Most are small, some are massive, but even deciding the first word of a chapter is still a decision.

The difference between humans and AI is that humans can have *intention*. We can make decisions based on what we think will service the greater whole of a work. AI isn't completely random, it makes its choices based on a set of criteria, but it's still not really "intelligent" in the way humans are. If you ask humans why they chose one shot over another for a particular scene, they can give you a *reason*. And AI can't.

So for me it's not so much about whether AI can make good art, or whether it takes the soul out of art, even though those are important things to consider. It's about how, when given the choice, an artist should always choose to make something themselves, because the joy of watching your work come together as each small decision you make builds on itself is erased when AI does it all for you.

AI can approximate the output of art but it can't replicate *intent*, and intent can be the difference maker between something bland and something special, in ways that are invisible to people who haven't tried their hand at a huge creative endeavor themselves.

[ThatOneIrishFurry]

hank just made me consider that even outside the moral implications of ai art the "enshittification" of ai is probably gonna be very shitty

[cuitonwap]

i laughed at the bit where you said that we are not going to closely scrutinize each of the images we see everyday, bc that's always been a thing that i do, since however long i look at art. which had helped me navigate my way through a lot of things in my life that i have an interest in; people tracing others artworks, reposting images and claiming it as their own, and now ai generated images. that said, i agree that for the majority of ppl, ppl who haven't spent their lives closely scrutinizing art for the sake of enjoying it, it wouldn't matter really, to try to learn how to spot ai. bc ai will keep getting better, it already has.

[GoddessPallasAthena]

So many of us have studied and practiced art - whether digital or traditional. For us it DOES matter. AI "artists" often steal parts of work done by actual humans. And it disturbs me that it may not be scrutinized. Recently, I see so many of them posted on "art groups" where they use words like "digital art" (which AI may be PART OF, but many of us would like them to be labeled clearly as AI). I also see a lot of architectural and interior decorating photos that make NO SENSE. Stairs going down the cliff into NOTHING (I mean, right to where a cliff falls off) to a weird appendage (like a mini-bed) stuck to the side of a larger bed, or candles placed on FLUFFY RUGS or BEDS. IF AI is to be allowed, they need to be clearly labeled as such.

I hope more people care, other than artists. The creative field should have been the LAST thing that AI (and people who used them) should have gone into. But people don't observe, or for that matter, care all that much about quality, so I'm thinking things will get worse and worse as time goes on, as people are discouraged from actually creating their own images, because . . . why?

[ClintBandito]

I was not ready for this video to just be over. You had more thoughts and I'm invested, please continue 🥺

[skeletor-sxhy]

As a fan of both Magic the Gathering and this community, I will absolutely watch Hank and John sit down and try to figure out a game of commander together.

[daineminton]

It most certainly does matter, especially to those it directly effects. This is the artists who make content, and those who collect (including play) MTG. The value of MTG isn't the card mechanics itself. The brand was built off of the creativity of human artists in their depictions of the scenes that vastly added upon the game mechanics in how it would look into action. This aids the imagination of the players, which makes the game meaning in context.

A.I. art is fun & entertaining, not going to argue against that. However, some of the trained models was trained off of a lot of intellectual property that entities own. Midjourney, is in the hot seat legally for this, if I remember correctly. Be honest, would you rather read your brother's book that were written by him or a simulation of his style of writing? Give me human artistry every time, to that I can imagine & empathize more strongly vs the output of a complex program. Also, I will always want to know about the creator of the piece of artistic media.

[captaindragon]

It's not often that is disagree with Hank but this is one. It does matter! This is the age of information, and these tools are powering more and more disinformation.
These days more and more things are privatised including news sources, and that means information which is hard to spoof is becoming more and more important. Images used to be critical for that but now with unmoderated deepfakes and AI generated images it's far harder to find trusted information, not to mention what it's doing to the artistic communities in in both the professional and hobby fields. Already artist are loosing potential customers because of these tools based on their own stolen work.