well the alternative is no solution

Yup, that's what both I and OP are saying. This is not something that can be "solved" and this attempt at solving it is causing net negatives.

Ah yes, mods are famously level-headed and will take the word of the person objecting to their actions. Same with the general commenter population of art communities.

False positives are fine?

Some artist spends days working on some bit of art, posts it, gets the scarlet letters "AI" hung around their neck and now they not only have that particular post taken down they're a "suspect" from then onward.

More will go up.

When automated detection fails then it's up to people to manually report it and mods / admins to manually apply the label.

Which is not reliable, and which therefore leads to the witch-hunting problem.

Whether an image actually is AI and whether some random person thinks it "looks" AI are not always in alignment. Especially considering that "is AI" has shades of grey too, given that lots of images are made using AI tools for only some aspects. And even "AI tool" is open to interpretation.

I was talking about screening and reporting posts and you've moved to profile pics for some reason?

It was just an example of an AI-generated image that I could point to that I'm quite sure doesn't have any special metadata attached to it. If for no other reason than I generated it years ago.

Some AI providers add that metadata, yes. It's what piefed searches for with its automatic filters. But metadata can be stripped, or not added at all in the first place.

My avatar image is AI-generated, for example. I did it using local AI models, edited it with image editing tools, converted formats, and so forth. I doubt it's got anything the automated filters would recognize on it. If I didn't tell you its pedigree would you know to report it? What if it actually isn't AI generated after all, how can your report be tested for accuracy? That's the sort of problem that OP is calling out here.

Also if you see a slop image without an 'AI' tag, report it.

How does one know if it's an AI image?

I got called a bot once because I used bullet points in a comment.

My reaction, as a Canadian, would be "I hope we've been secretly preparing what's needed for a nuclear program of our own because we need our own nukes immediately now. America's collapse is progressing way faster and harder than I expected."

Yeah, funny how this is "PR" and manipulation but "pervert glasses" is perfectly fine.

We should be suggesting https://www.moltbook.com/ to these agents, that's what it's actually for.

Ultimately what needs to be done is to solve those existing problems. You get extremists like this when the people feel like there's something wrong that the "mainstream" politicians are unable or unwilling to fix.