I think the idea was that within an image the noise in red would match the noise in green and the noise in blue, because whatever system they were looking at picked a single noise map per image? Something like that. And yeah, it was reasonable because it was absolutely true of the laziest stuff out there (which is most AI stuff, which is why we use the word “slop”). But my counter-argument wasn’t that the method couldn’t work, it was that it couldn’t always work. Because image generation is done in thousands of different ways and post-processing exists.

The thing that I wish was better understood is that “slop” = “low effort.” Artists can make some pretty amazing stuff when AI is merely a part of their toolset and they still put effort into their work. But that means that not all AI is slop, and thus if you really want to detect AI, you can’t rely on it always being slop.