If you’re wondering why there’s so much resistance to the idea of a 4-day work week, or why automation hasn’t actually led to people working less like it was supposed to…
LOVE reading pliny the elder and coming across a passage where he says shit like “so some people say that if a horse steps in a wolf’s tracks it will fucking EXPLODE”
You know those aesthetic image posts that float around tumblr? I’m … starting to see a lot on my dash that are obviously ai-generated. Are non-artists having trouble telling the difference between AI images and real photos, or are people starting to stop care about the stolen art that gets fed into those programs?
I have no actual art training, so I want it known that if I ever DO reblog some ai stuff please let me know. It was unintentional and I would like to know. Thanks~
Yeah, I figure this is the case for most people. I’m going to put up a guide to spotting AI images after work!
I think people know by now how to tell if an image of a person is AI-generated. Count the fingers, count the knuckles, check the pupils, yadda yadda. I’ve seen several posts circulating about what to look for. However, I think people are a LOT less educated about backgrounds, and about the specific distinctions between human error and AI error. So that’s what I’m going to cover.
Now, don’t feel bad if you’ve reblogged or liked any of the images I’m about to show you guys. This is just what’s crossed my blog, so it’s what I have to work with. (Actually, thanks for providing the examples!)
I also generated a few images from crAIyon purely for demonstrational purposes, because I didn’t have anything on-hand to show my thoughts.
Firstly — Keep in mind that AI has a difficult time replicating “simple” styles. Think colorless line-drawings, cartoony pieces with thick lines, and pixel art.
Looks unsettling, right?
Why is this? Well, when a human makes art, we’re more prone to under-detailing by mistake than over-detailing, because adding detail in the first place place is more effort. A skilled artist should be good able to capture an idea with minimal, evocative shape language.
But when an AI makes art, it is the opposite. An AI doesn’t understand what it’s looking at, not in the way that you or I do. All it can do is search for and replicate patterns in the noise of pixels. As a result, it is prone to mushing together features in ways that a human artist … wouldn’t intentionally think to do.
It also over-details, replicating what it knows over and over again because it doesn’t know when it’s supposed to stop. Blank spaces can confuse it! It likes having detail to work with! Detail Is Data!
Again, this is why we count fingers.
These general principles still apply when we’re looking at styles that an AI is better equipped to imitate. So …
Secondly — AI’s tendency to over-render details makes it easier for it to pick up heavily detailed styles, especially if the style will still hold up when certain details are indistinct or merge together unexpectedly.
Scrutinize images that utilize a painterly, heavily-rendered, or photo-realistic style. Such as this one.
Thirdly — An AI piece that looks pretty good from a distance falls apart up close.
The above image looks almost like a photograph, but there is architecture here that you wouldn’t find in a real room, and mistakes that you wouldn’t find in the work of an artist that is THIS good at rendering. Or most beginner artists, even.
Can you see what falls apart here? Hint; we’re counting fingers again.
Check the window panes. Isn’t the angle that they all meet up at a little off? Why are the panes sized so inconsistently? Why doesn’t the view outside of them all line up into a cohesive background?
Count the furniture legs. Why does the farther-back case have a third leg? Why does the leg on the closer case vanish so strangely behind the flowery details?
Examine the curtain(?) fabric at the top of the window. What on earth IS that frilly stuff?
Another mistake that AI will make is drawing lines and merging details that a human artist would never think of as connected. See the lines crawling up the walls? See how some of the flower petals glop together at hard angles in some places? Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about.
You can see more strange architecture in the outdoor setting of this image.
A lot of the AI’s mistakes are almost art nouveau! We recognize that buildings are consistently angular, for stability reasons. An AI does not. (Also look at the trees in the background, and how they tend to warp and distort around the outline of the treehouse. They kinda melt into each other at some points. It’s wild.)
Fourthly — An AI will replicate any carelessness that was introduced into its original data set.
Obviously, this means that AIs will make fake watermarks, but everybody already knows that. What I need you guys to look out for is something else. It’s called artifacting.
Artifacting is defined as “the introduction of a visible or audible anomaly during the processing or transmission of digital data.” To put it in layman’s terms, you know how an image gets crunchy and pixelated if you save it as a jpg? Yeah. That. An AI with lots of crusty, crunchy jpgs fed into it will produce crunchy images.
Look at the floor at the bottom of our original example image;
See the speckles all along the glass panels, table legs, and flowers in shadow? Artifacted to hell and back! This shit is crunchier than my spine after spending half a day hunched over my laptop.
Again, legitimate art and photography may have artifacting too just because of file formatting reasons. But most artists don’t intentionally artifact their own images, and furthermore, the artifacting will not be baked into the very composition of the image itself. The speckles will instead gather most notably on flat colors at the border of different color patches and/or outlines.
Cronchy memes; funny. Cronchy AI art; shitty jpg art theft caught red-handed.
That’s probably all the lessons I can impart in one post. Class dismissed! As homework a bonus, consider these two sister images to our original flower room. Can you spot any signs of AI generation?
My biggest tip is to also look at decorative patterns. Since AI’s don’t know what they’re actually making, things like a relief pattern on a throne or etchings on a piece of weapon will just be messy noise with no rhyme or reason to it.
Even though portraits often result in less artefacts since there’s less variables for the AI to try and process, the overly crisp, highly rendered style can be easy to pick out after a while.
To recognize TERFs, anti’s, fash, incels and other internet shitstains, one pattern you need to recognize is this:
They take some normal human behavior
Explain it in the darkest, most bad faith way possible
And then ignore any other, often more realistic, explanation.
A simple example:
A lot of adults watch TV shows about high school relationship drama.
Dark bad faith take: all these adults are obsessing over teenager sex lives because they want to fuck teenagers.
More realistic explanation: a lot of adults have memories of their own high school relationship drama that they like to relive, process, etc through media.
Another realistic explanation: People can empathize with the stories of hobbits, dragons, defense lawyers, plucky detectives, space rebels, talking dogs and teenagers in high school without always having a desire to fuck the characters involved.
It is possible to just enjoy a story as a story without it fulfilling some emotional of sexual need.
Like, when you take a tiny step back, it becomes clear that the jump from ‘adults watch high school dramas’ to ‘they all want to fuck teenagers’ is absolute moon logic.
This logic only works if you assume the absolute worst possible things about the group you’re talking about.
This logic works if the only lens you can see a group through is ‘predator’ and you do not acknowledge that they are completely humans who can just do non-predatory things like ‘enjoying stories’.
And
assuming the absolute worst possible things
about a specific group while denying their complexity and humanity… well, that is absolutely key to what TERFs, anti’s, fashos, incels, etc. do.
Someone asked me in private why I grouped ‘TERFs, anti’s, fash, incels’ together. Do I think anti’s are as bad as fash?
Short answer: no, anti’s are not as bad as fash. They’ve done some pretty despicable things. Spreading false accusations, doxxing, suicide baiting, trying to get people fired, stalking, etc. But they’re not trying to gain political power in order to commit genocide. So on the shitstain pyramid they’re a few tiers below fash.
I grouped these in a row here not because they’re all exactly the same amount of terrible, but because they’re groups to watch out for. If you’re a queer person trying to exist safely online, you do not want to interact with any of these groups. If you do not enjoy being brainwashed into a hate group, you do not want to interact with any of these groups.
It’s also notable that
TERFs, incels and anti’s all
have a tendency to fall down the fash radicalization pipeline because they already share some basic ways of thinking. Assuming the absolute worst possible things
about a specific group while denying their complexity and humanity is an example of that shared way of thinking.
I learned in my political science class that all major famines in the 20th century and onward have been caused by oppressive groups or political situations restricting access to food, NOT natural causes like crop failure
not QUITE true; some of them have been caused by political situations causing mass crop failure!
tumblr not being on the list of banned platforms is pretty funny, but at least some publications also not including it in the list of platforms not banned is even funnier
I am Silver Tongue, I am an artist. I have many characters and you can check out my art in the art tag. I occasionally practice witchcraft though I don't do anything too complicated. I am girl 2 and don't know what else to put here.
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