this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2023
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cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/3974080

Hey everyone. I made a casual survey to see if people can tell the difference between human-made and AI generated art. Any responses would be appreciated, I'm curious to see how accurately people can tell the difference (especially those familiar with AI image generation)

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The scenery ones are near impossible to tell because you have no context. The pencil art one is impressive though.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There are things you can look for. When it isn't generated, you can spot parts where the artist got lazy. Sometimes, if the art style allows for it, you can spot simple shapes that are left over, and the lighting.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Also things like the butterfly in one of them look off in a way that a human who's seen one won't draw it as if they're actually capable of the rest of the image

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

The butterfly was sus, but I've seen my fair share of horrendous horses in broadcast anime. I was tipped off, but I didn't judge off of just that.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I got all the landscape ones correct—except for one—by applying my limited knowledge of art technique.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I did bad.

But I expected to do bad. AI generation has become too good.

You tell yourself you can identify them, because sometimes you notice weird artifacts and spot the AI quickly. But we’re really only noticing the bad ones. We’ll never even know the good ones were AI most of the time, so we can’t balance how good we think we are at spotting them against how often we were actually wrong.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I was missing a "don't know"/"can't determine" option.

For photographs specifically and some types of paintings/artificial stuff, there are things you can look for. But for other things, I feel like, or at least to my knowledge, you can't.

Like the pencil drawing. There's not enough things it could be doing wrong. It's a sketch. With simplistic but "error-excusing"/diffuse/transformable content.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

The goal isn't really to be a quiz, but rather just to see how susceptible people are to AI generated art. Many of the images I chose are intentionally vague, 80% of people so far got the line art sketch wrong, and that's with knowing that many of these are AI generated. The results are definitely interesting to see.

A "don't know" option would ruin the point since most people would just choose that. I want to see where people lean towards.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The back left leg of the bench in the pencil drawing is in the wrong place - at least that was what I considered the 'tell'.

But I found it really hard to spot the AI.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

13/20, I work in AI. The paintings were the hardest for me, because the art style obfuscates some of the AI artefacts that can be tells.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I basically came here to say this. The paintings are hard but real life photos are easier.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

10/20.

You can only fool me half the time! Joke's on you, robots!

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (8 children)

14 / 20 here. I dunno why there are so many people, particularly on Reddit, who absolutely hate AI art. Yeah some of it can look janky, uncanny valley, or such but a lot of it looks really damn cool.

And not all of us have talents to create visual art of our own so text creation is much more accessible for us to explore our imaginations. Or lack the money to commission pieces from human artists.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I suspect they hate it not because of any features of the actual images themselves, but for what it means to how society as a whole treats art.

For some it's simply financial. Their career is at stake, an industry that they thought was a stable source of employment is now on the leading edge of a huge shake-up that might not need them at all in the future.

For others it's seen as an attack on their personal self-worth. For years - for generations - there has been a steady drumbeat insistence that art is what makes humans "special." Both specific artists, and humanity in general. It was supposed to be a special skill that we had that set us above the animals and the machines. And now that's been usurped.

It's like the old folk take of John Henry, the steel-driving man who made a heroic last stand against Skynet's forces in the railroad construction industry. People want to think humans are irreplaceable and art seemed like a rock-solid anchor for that. Turns out it was actually not.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

8/20. I am pretty good on photorealistic images, but the random drawings... honestly a lot of the ones by people I tagged as AI generated because i thought they kinda sucked.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

FML. 8 out of 20. I suck at this.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I got 17 out of 20. I pegged the bezerk drawing as generated because the bottom part of the armor lacked symmetry and didn't make any sense. I got the other three line drawings incorrect.

I have spent WAAAAY to much of my freetime generating images and apparently have picked up an eye for the weird types of artifacts that these generators produce. The hardest one to articulate is that generated images have a very specific type of noise. Images create a very nice grainy type noise while digital images get more of the blocky jpeg artifacts and banding. Generated images get this weird hybrid of the two that isn't consistent across the whole image.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Got 7/20, the second photo really did surprise me!

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The AI overlords will kill you first. Your victory will be hollow and sour.

Good job!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

10/20, this was indeed harder, especially the ones that were similar styles but not consistently AI or human-generated. I think images of paintings was kind of cheating, though...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

13/20, but there was a lot of guessing in there. I would have believed any of them going either way.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Nice try robots! I’m not helping you learn how to fool us humans.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

10/20 and most of it was just guess work. It has become pretty much impossible to tell when you pick real images that are in the style of AI images, you really have to go pixel hunting to find artifacts and even that is getting difficult, when things get blurry or you get JPEG artifacts when you zoom in.

That said, there are still plenty of images AI has a very hard time creating. Anything involving real world products will always look wonky in AI, interesting framing where you don't have one object in the center is hard. Unusual aspect ratio are hard, as AI is trained on squares. Complex scenes with multiple characters rarely work. Facial expressions are hard. And generally just normal everyday photos don't really work, AI stuff always looks like people posing for a stock photo.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Regardless of score bragging, it requires some technical knowledge and pixel peeping to really be able to tell, and even then I can't guarantee you can. I would imagine your average Joe wouldn't even know any better.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Got 10/20. The second photo really threw me for a loop. All the texture on the skin and and hair led me to believe human; I noticed the weird patch on the shoulder and the unnatural shine on the ear but excused it as technical flaws or something, chose human in the end. I really thought that corporate logo style drawing of the avocado was human, like it wasn't even a question for me and yet the fact that it was AI really surprised me.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

14/20, huh. i seem to have learned a lot from all of the ai generated pics on rule34.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

15/20 damn this was a lot harder than I expected. I've found that analyzing the pictures for small details that make no sense or lack context on why they are there helps greatly. But damn these things have better better fast

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

The avocado had real text. Is Dall-E 3 capable of creating legible text?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yes, it's the only model that manages to get text right, and the results are usually pretty consistent. It's a big step forward.

AI generated photo of a cat saying "I'm king of the world!"

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Idk about anyone else but its a bit long. Up to q10 i took it seriously and actually looked for ai gen artifacts (and got all of them up to 10 correct) and then I just sorta winged it and guessed and got like 50% of them right. OP if you are going to use this data anywhere I would first recommend getting all of your sources together as some of those did not have a good source, but also maybe watch out for people doing what I did and getting tired of the task and just wanting to see how well i did on the part i tried. I got like 15/20

For anyone wanting to get good at seeing the tells, focus on discontinuities across edges: the number or intensity of wrinkles across the edge of eyeglasses, the positioning of a railing behind a subject (especially if there is a corner hidden from view, you can imagine where it is, the image gen cannot). Another tell is looking for a noisy mess where you expect noisy but organized: cross-hatching trips it up especially in boundary cases where two hatches meet, when two trees or other organic looking things meet together, or other lines that have a very specific way of resolving when meeting. Finally look for real life objects that are slightly out of proportion, these things are trained on drawn images, and photos, and everything else and thus cross those influences a lot more than a human artist might. The eyes on the lego figures gave it away though that one also exhibits the discontinuity across edges with the woman's scarf.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

11/20 but many times I wasn't sure, and most times I thought that this pic doesn't belong into such a survey, because it is too simple.

The survey question is more meaningful when it's about photorealistic images. Simple advertising graphics are meaningless either way.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

[Survey] Can you tell which Surveys are AI generated??

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

11/20, the LEGO one got me good

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I did well with the photograph ones, bad with the drawings, as I suspected.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I didn't do great. Dalli-3 is really good and I couldn't spot anything obvious in most of the pictures.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I'm happy with 12/20

At least I can say that I'm better than average

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

A couple were surprising but others seemed obvious in hindsight. Some of these AI models have a really specific vibe that is easy to spot. It can be removed sometimes but if the prompts don't prevent it, the images tend to have this glow and pop that many real images don't have. They're perfectly detailed if that makes sense.

Got 14/20, which I feel pretty good about, but you do this survey every year and it's gonna keep going lower. I bet even a year ago, most people would be above 75% accuracy.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I got 9/20 lmao.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Surprised I got 16/20

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

No thanks. I get enough google just visiting random websites

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