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Well, it looks like verification photos might be useless now. (startrek.website)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
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[–] 126 points 2 years ago (43 children)

Due to having so many people trying to impersonate me on the internet, I've become somewhat of a expert on verification pictures.

You can still easily tell that this is fake because if you look closely, the details, especially the background clutter, is utterly nonsensical.

  1. The object over her right shoulder (your left), for example, looks like if someone blended a webcam with a TV with a nightstand.
  2. Over her left shoulder (your right), her chair is only on that one side and it blends into the counter in the background.
  3. Is it a table lamp or a wall mounted light?
  4. The doorframe in background behind her head is not even aligned.
  5. Her clavicles are asymmetrical, never seen that on a real person.
  6. Her wispy hairstrands. Real hair don't appear out of thin air in loops.
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  • [–] 44 points 2 years ago (10 children)

    The point isn't that you can spot it.

    The point is that the automated system can't spot it.

    Or are you telling me there is a person looking at every verification photo, and if they did they would thoroughly scan the photo for imperfections?

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  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    The idea of using a picture upload for automated verification is completely unviable. A much more commonly used system would be something like telling you to perform a random gesture on camera on the spot, like "turn your head slowly" or "open your mouth slowly" which would be trivial for a human to perform but near impossible for AI generators.

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  • [–] 23 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    but near impossible for AI generators.

    ...I feel like this isn't the first time I heard that statement before.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    It's not that difficult to identify if you have a good understanding of photography principles. The lighting on this image is the biggest tell for me personally, since I can't visualize any lighting setup that can cast shadows in the directions that's shown on this picture, it just instinctually looks wrong to me on first sight because of the impossible light sources.

    That's the reason the picture looks WRONG, even if you can't identify the reason why it looks wrong.

    I only focused on the nonsense background clutters because I think it's easier for people who don't work around cameras all day.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago

    This is what makes this technology anxiety inducing at best...

    So, for yourself, you have no issues seeing the artificiality of the image due to your extensive exposure to and knowledge of photographic principles. This is fair... that said, I have read your earlier comment about the various issues with the photo as well as this one about light sources, and I keep going back to scrutinize those elements, and... for the life of me... I cannot pick out anything in the image that, to me, absolutely screams artificial.

    I'm fairly sure most people who look at these verification photos would be in a similar boat to me. Unless there's something glaringly obvious (malformed hands, eyes in the wrong place, a sudden cthulhu-esk eldritch thing unnaturally prowling the background holding a stuffed teddy bear) I feel most people would accept an image like this at face value. Alternatively, you'll get those same people so paranoid about AI generated fakes they'll falsely flag a real image as fake because of one or two elements they can't see clearly or have never seen before.

    And this is only the infancy of AI generated art. Every year it gets better. In a decade, unless there are some heavy limitations on how the AI is trained (of which, only public models would ever really have these limitations as private models would train be trained on whatever their developers saw fit... to shreds with what artists and copyright said), there would probably be no real way to tell a real image from a fake out apart at all... photographic principals and all.

    Interesting times :D

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago*

    near impossible for AI generators

    That's not really the case but moreoever the gap is closing at a blistering pace. Approximately two years ago this stuff was in the distant future. One year ago the lid was blown open. Today we're seeing real-time frame generation. This rallying against the tech is misguided. It needs to be embraced and understood. Trying to do otherwise is great folly as everything will fall even further behind and lead to even larger misunderstandings. This isn't theoretical. It's already here. We can't bury our heads in the sand.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago

    If you look at gaussian splatting and diffusion morphs/videos, this is merely in the space of "not broadly on hugging face yet" and not impossible, or even difficult depending on the gesture.

    We're months away from fully posable and animatable 3d models of these AI images. It already exists in demos and on arxiv, it runs on consumer hardware but not in realtime, so a video upload would work but a live stream would require renting a cloud GPU ($$$).

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    Having an AI act out random gestures is really not that different from generating an image based on a prompt if you think about it. The temporal element has already been done, the biggest factor right now is probably that it's too computationally heavy to do in real time, but I can't see that being a problem for more than a year.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    More than that - these systems will eventually figure out how to not bitch the background so obviously. Then what? As others have said, we could switch to verification videos. That will be an extra year or two.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago*

    I think so. I don't think there would be more than a few dozens of verification to do every day, with a dozen of mods, it seems doable in this context. It's not like millions of users are asking for verification every day.

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  • [–] 40 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    Margot Robbie

    Due to having so many people trying to impersonate me on the internet

    Uh huh.

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  • [–] 27 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (6 children)

    That's esteemed Academy Award nominated verification picture expert/character actress Margot Robbie to you!

    Now watch me win my Golden Globe tonight. (Still no best actress... sigh)

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  • [–] 24 points 2 years ago* (6 children)

    Her clavicles are asymmetrical, never seen that on a real person.

    Shit, are you telling me that every time I see myself in the mirror I'm actually looking at a string of AI generated images, generated in real-time? The matrix is real. 😱

    It's either that, or my clavicles are actually very asymmetric. ☹️

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    What I meant is that her right clavicle (your left) is about an inch higher than her left.

    I could be wrong, of course, but I imagine if that condition actually exists, then it would be extremely painful.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I was agreeing with everything you've said, but I was in a pretty nasty bike accident years back which dislocated my clavical. Which now makes it sit about half an inch higher; mainly on the neck side. I was freaked out at first but the doctor said to just live with it so it can happen.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago*

    Yeah, I see what you mean, but my shoulders look almost exactly like that. Doesn't hurt at all, just very annoying when carrying a backpack as the straps will always tend to slide off from my 'drooping' shoulder.

    But I agree with your comments about the background, that looks like a fever dream. And of course my situation isn't the norm, so the shoulders/clavicles can be treated as a red flag, it's just not definite proof and care should be taken to realise some people might actually just be built weird.

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  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Due to so many people trying to impersonate me on the Internet

    Yeah see, now I am not really sure if you're the real Margot Robbie.

    Could you send me a verification picture?

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago

    But then how will I astroturf (I mean, organically market) my current and future movies, like Golden Globe winning summer blockbuster, Barbie, now available on Blu-Ray and select streaming services, here if I get verified?

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  • [–] 18 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I'm not seeing the levitating hair

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Me neither. There's clearly more pictures that aren't included here, so maybe on one of those?

    The odd thing about the hair in that picture to me is that on the left side of the photo, there's one piece that seems to go on a nearly 90 degree bend for seemingly no reason, mid air. I don't generally see hair get.... Kinked like that. I suppose it's not outside the realm of possibility, but it's odd at least.

    The rest of the hair seems fine to me, but I'm no expert.

    I will note however that the object(s) in the background on the left side of the photo look like a gigantic (novelty sized) point and shoot camera from the 90's. The box on top is the viewfinder and there's the impression of a circle below that which would be the lens.

    Just makes me giggle at the thought of such a large disposable camera.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    every time I'd seen this photo, I only focused on the subject in the foreground, if I were the one verifying that the person in the photo is real, I'd have fallen for it. To me, the subject is entirely convincing. the issues you mentioned about the clavicles and hair, i think kind of make it a bit more convincing. Nobody is completely symmetrical for one, so seeing something like that, while not common, wouldn't be necessarily uncommon. The hair, to me, just looks like normal person hair. sometimes hair do be like that.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Didn't get the 5^th point, there's only one clavicle visible, am I missing something?

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    An easy 'solution' to fix the background is to just use a mild blurring tool. They're verifying you not your house, it wouldn't be sus to just have a mild messy blur around you.

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