Distrust the situation, not just the picture.

Yes.

I remember the r/isitAI subreddit being chockablock with,

This hot, successful 25-year-old Korean business woman is totally in love with grandfather in Des Moines after she accidentally texted him; her webcam has been down for the year they've been talking, so they've never videoed, but here is her picture.

Is it AI?

TL;DR the same way you detect lies, be skeptical of untrustworthy sources and think critically.

It's still weird people don't just use spider tingles...

We're pattern recognition machines and we don't need to conciously be aware of all the signs of AI.

It would be like trying to teach an adult how to ride a bike by telling them what muscles to constrict in what order.

With enough time and effort it might work, but it's the worst way to learn how to ride a bike and anyone that learns and only rides a bike that way is gonna fucking suck compared to someone who offloaded the specifics to their unconscious mind and just gives general commands like "turn left".

Tldr:

You can tell when it's AI, because of the way it is.

Trying to get nity gritty and pick out specifics isn't sustainable long term. The only downside is false negatives from everyone needlessly upscaling pictures, but those would happen no matter what.

The real answer is that there isn't always any way to tell if an image is AI generated, and as time passes while there may always be tells for poorly done images the percentage of generated images displaying those tells will continue to rapidly shrink.

You can only find signs an image was AI generated in images that display those signs. That doesn't mean you're weeding them all out, or even 1% of them.

Even if you spend a month looking at every tiny detail of an image, unless you physically witnessed it's creation or it's something with known provenance (i.e. the Mona Lisa) you can never say for certain that it is not AI generated.

Spotting a fake used to mean spotting edits, such as a repeating background, a shadow in the wrong place, or artefacts around a pasted-in object. That worked because manipulated images usually started with a real photo, leaving clues behind.

AI-generated images are different. They’re created from scratch, with no original image underneath, so those kinds of editing mistakes often don’t exist.

Even this is out-of-date, thanks to edit-models. This is why 'replace her clothes with a micro-bikini' is a problem. The model also doesn't clone-tool from nearby in the same image, like us Photoshop Phriday veterans. They're fully capable of generating an image from scratch, but replace just enough to blend into a given photo.

An image used to be reasonable proof that something happened.

Ehhhh.

Even SynthID, Openai's latest watermarking technique can be somewhat reliably bypassed with a comfyui workflow that is just designed to repaint the picture.

In short, detection and watermarking are not currently winning. The quality bypassed human capabilities sometime early last year at least.

My biggest concern is not that people believe the fake images and videos (which is still an issue), but that people will now not believe the real images and videos. The burden of proof has moved significantly. Commit a crime and if you were caught on camera, you were done for. Now you can just claim it’s generated and the prosecutor has to prove the veracity of the recording. All these Gen AI creations are introducing a lot more “reasonable doubt” which should be concerning.