Chamomile🐑

The thing I've also started looking out for is kind of adjacent to your example of everything looking too perfect: the hair. A lot of AI generators love to make hair look so perfectly brushed and combed that the hair is almost totally evenly spaced. Look at the wedding photo here specifically: while the AI is good at stray hairs around the edges of the guy's head, his sideburns and beard are almost mechanically separated to be nearly perfect. It's as if 80% of that man's head was hair plugs. The first Biden fake is the same way: lots of stray hairs around the edge highlights, but otherwise almost combed almost supernaturally even.

Very good post and makes explicit a lot of intuitions people have been forming

Very interesting writeup !
On the texture etc. points I am often wondering if an image is AI-made because it looks so clean that it's unrealistic or not because for all I know it could also just be someone overdoing it in photoshop, and there's been a lot of that a decade ago or so. I don't put it above political communication teams to arrange a candidate so much that it looks like a self-conscious teenager's selfie.
It also made me think of a thing that probably has little to do with it, that when I draw pictures, I am liable to make similar mistakes to AI tells sometimes, especially when inking and being inattentive. Continuity mistakes, filling spaces with random shapes that just look right etc.
It's both artificial and kinda human.

What we're experiencing now isn't exactly new, it's just a gear shift that we aren't used to.

This is such a key point IMO. I’m old enough to remember when Photoshop first took off, and the associated concerns about “you won’t know what to believe anymore”. And yet somehow society did not collapse. We’re not used to e.g. audio deepfakes yet, but we will be, and we’ll continue to need the same rubrics of “who do you trust? why?” that have always existed.

Fantastic writeup, thank you!

fantastic guide! and also genuinely interesting--if only ai wasnt coopted for so many malicious purposes, there is some really fascinating tech under there. and in contrast it teaches us a lot about seeing and the logics of how our brains process image. really cool stuff!!

Another analogy I use for people is to think about an artist painting themselves into a corner. Since AIs have no ability to plan ahead, a line going one way suddenly needs some kind of resolution. Why is this like this? Why is the shadow going over here? And then does its absolute best to make it retroactively make sense -- but only within the context of what's near it ("near" being variable with the power of the generator you're using.)

This is just another way of talking about the bow example, the line on the plate, the phone cord to nowhere, etc. The most rushed artist in the world is faced with a splotchy painting where paint can never be removed and has such intense tunnel vision that they can only see a sixteenth of the painting at a time, and they do their best under intense pressure.

This same kind of sort of retroactive sensemaking is how language models also work. I don't think AIs produce human work, but I do think that there are interesting thoughts they can provoke about how we also rationalize our own behaviour, at least. Furiously making a complex set of lies and excuses for how it's very reasonable that we ended up in this situation...

For me, Ears tend to be a pretty big giveaway, provided the photo has them in shot. I suspect they're a bit of a nightmare case for AI generators: ears have lots of detail, but unless there is something odd about them, no-one takes photos of ears so they'll be underrepresented in training data.

To me, a lot of AI generated ears look like props or grafted on - for example, the second Biden photo looks like it's halfway to a Spock ear.

This looks more like a digital painting than a photograph.

This is also something i've struggled to articulate. It's as if everyone is under studio lighting, everything's soft and diffuse, but nothing matches up. There's just perfect highlights and glints, and never any shadows.

There's also vibes I get where the depth of field seems off, but neither feels easy to put into words. That, and these are just as often signs of photoshop as they are midjourney.

This is a great write-up - I think you sell yourself short a little! You clearly know what you're talking about, and I learned something about how these models work. Thanks for the information; I think you've framed this in a very useful way.

Another example of the generator not being good at replicating very reglemented detail like text that you can see in the Biden images: The flag! The US flag on his sleeve has only eleven stripes, and the canton with the stars is a complete mess. And since it is missing two stripes at the bottom, it makes the flag have visually a wrong aspect ratio too.

Though I find it interesting that it made the same mistake in both of them.

Imo this tech is fascinating and something they should be studying in university labs, not something desperately marketed to industry and the public by capitalist ghouls who may be cultists (have you read some of this AGI believer stuff? Utterly bonkers.)

People talk about the hands and letters. The obvious problem is that if someone really WANTS you to fall for a fake, and has even a small amount of talent, they can load it up in Photoshop and fix those problems. Still a fake, it's just taken a little bit more effort than just typing a line of text in. But not as much as making the whole thing from scratch.

That said, I've not seen any actual PROPER fakes like this, where a skilled human fixed the obviously broken stuff up afterwards. It's just not worth the time, effort and money in most cases, because even the slightest fact-checking (was Biden wearing uniform? When? And why?) reveals it's a fake anyway.

That's the funny thing. Those Trump "photos". Just take some stock photos and paste Trumps' head in with MSPaint. Just as unconvincing, but in a different way - at least the text is correct! And just as effective at influencing those who don't even think or want to cast a critical eye on them.