#something that i struggle with. i cannot paint photorealistically

[mars-ipan]

just remembered i’m taking a painting class next semester and i feel….. soooooo not ready for it <333

[godtier]

AI art detection methods: a starter guide

so here it is, my starter guide on how to detect AI art.

to set the tone of this guide: i am not really the type to go full-ass pitchforks and torches and call someone a bad person or dumb for liking, reblogging, or even using AI art for inspiration/mood board/etc purposes without knowing that it was AI generated in the first place.

it has become incredibly difficult to detect these things as the models are becoming more and more accurate with certain subjects. it's why i decided to write this guide in the first place. i take these situations as learning opportunities, to use corpo speak lmao, and so i don't think there's any value in shaming anyone for liking/reblogging smth "SO OBVIOUSLY AI."

they might not have known, so teach them!

after all, everyone starts somewhere, so it's best to help teach when you can! do not use these methods to bully people or falsely accuse people because i will know and be very disappointed in you. >:(

so if you are concerned about reblogging something that is AI-generated, for whatever reason it may be, i can provide some quick[citation needed] tips that i use to detect it with some level of accuracy. this is especially useful when people don't tag their pictures as AI-generated.

PLEASE NOTE: this is not, by any means, meant as a catch-all, 100% success rate way of detecting AI art. learning models are trained off of existing art styles, after all, and you may come across a legitimate artist whose style is widely replicated by algorithms. this can give the perception that the artist is the one faking it.

check your work before accusing anyone. in fact, don't do public callouts unless you have irrefutable proof. a hunch or coincidences are not irrefutable proof. it'll save everyone a lot of headaches if you end up being wrong and you could also potentially damage someone's career (and risk getting sued for it).

a lot of these steps come with the expectation that you will do some legwork to figure out if something is actually a generated image or not. it's not always the same every time and it will rapidly change depending on what model is used and what prompts are used. these are guidelines, not tenets.

anyway, in no particular order:

one: stylistic and subject consistency

if you see a post in which several images are presented in a way that suggests they are a set (i.e.: the same subject at different angles), check for consistency.

a bouquet of flowers should not have the flowers positioned in different ways or omitted entirely between shots, especially if you suspect it's meant to be presented as photography. most photographers won't rearrange flowers between shots unless they're trying to achieve a specific sort of effect. in short, if it's just a few aspects of the subject that are omitted but the general piece looks "the same," it's probably not a photo. if it's presented as a hand-drawn piece, rearranged or missing pieces are also a flag; speaking as an artist, if i were to redraw something at a different angle, i wouldn't omit stuff that should still be visible in the new angle.

it is also good to check the artist's blog for consistency in style; if they are posting a lot of really detailed landscapes in one style and then posting anime-style stuff in another, that can be a flag.

that's not to say that artists cannot have multiple styles (i do!) but it's exceedingly rare that someone who is a wizard at photorealistic ethereal landscapes would also be a wizard at big tiddy animu waifus and amazingly smooth calarts style cartoons. i'm talking like "this looks like it was a cel from an anime" and "this looks like a painting in the louvre." that level of dissonance.

dissonance is key; if it seems weird, be a little wary and look into it further.

two: lighting

AI models often struggle with lighting A LOT. no matter what the subject is, the lighting will oftentimes be incorrect in a lot of pieces. this can be hard for people to notice, but the light source should be consistent.

let's look at an example:

this fellow has a gigantic sun lighting the background. we can see that the background objects (such as what i think are trees?) are lit with that in mind for the most part. however, the foreground appears to be lit from the right (subject's left). with a light source that gigantic in the background, even in a cartoonish style, one would think the subject would be more in shadow, like this:

as a side-tangent, this is why a huge rule of thumb with photography is that the sun should be in front of the subject, unless you're going for a stylistic choice like this. reason being is the sun overtakes the entire frame when in the back.

of course, actual real-life artists struggle with this too! in which case, your best bet is to look at the artist's previous posts and see if there's consistency, as in point one.

three: types of mistakes and other common traits

so one way to check if you suspect a piece is AI generated is to look for the commonly known mistakes or "tells." you want to drill down, basically, from easiest to hardest to detect/notice:

on human/humanoid subjects, the most obvious one (to the point of it being a meme) is how the fingers/toes look. such as too many/not enough, but not done in a deliberately stylized way (i.e.: an anime waifu drawn in the style of genshin impact having 4 fingers is likely not a stylistic choice since it's not a typically cohesive thing to do since everything else will look more "realistic." by contrast, a cartoony phinneas & ferb-style character may be expected to only have 4 fingers and simplistic clothing or accessories).

too many/not enough arms/legs. legs that appear where they shouldn't (i.e.: a character sitting cross-legged but then an extra leg somehow hanging down off a chair, etc).

blurry/uneven lines. this one might be hard to visualize, so the best way i can describe it is when you copy and paste something in photoshop or even MS paint and then move it over slightly. it creates a jagged edge:

here's our happy example man that i drew using a touchpad lmao. he's v happy in the first picture!

but then in the second picture, we can see that he's sprouted a new arm (incidentally, he's still happy)! but it doesn't look right, does it? it's because i copied a selected area and pasted it, then moved it down slightly.

you will find a lot of AI art will have aspects to it that look very similar to this, typically in areas where there's a lot of repetition, like grass or clouds.

weirdly detailed "bloom" or "smoothness" to the point of something looking very artificial, even for an artificial subject. the willy wonka knock-off installation in glasgow used images that are very obviously AI generated and embody this weirdness pretty clearly:

"bloom" is basically a term for nearly airbrushed-looking lighting. look closely and you'll see that everything has this sort of "sheen" or "glow" to it in a way that makes it look very strange and unnatural, but not in a way that looks handmade.

impossible geometry and/or landscapes that don't make logical sense. this one is probably one of the harder ones to detect because it often requires staring at an image for a bit, like a hidden object puzzle. to use the willy wonka knock-off pic again, the waterfall itself doesn't make sense:

where is the water coming from? it appears that it's coming from straight above just going by the direction of the "strokes" there, but as we see, there is no water source feeding this waterfall. it looks like the AI sort of started to create a waterfall on the rocks/grassy part above but got distracted or something halfway through (which is something that happens a lot with algorithms, oddly enough).

background objects that look fine at a glance, but when taken apart individually, are very odd/slapped together.

at a glance, this looks to be just a stock image of someone's drawing of a bunch of US currency and whatnot. but looking closer:

sure is a square-looking dollar bill there!

and on the other image, it appears as though the currency strap is melting/merging into the bill...? along with a coin? or something?

to another point similar as above, algorithms will also do a lot of "like with like." that is to say, they have a hard time delineating between objects when those objects are close to the same color or shade and also positioned very close together. it's often why fingers can merge together into a mush/stump on humanoid subjects. so for that currency strap example, it's a cream-ish color that is very close to the light green seen on the dollar bill design's negative space. this is likely why the algorithm merged them together; it doesn't know exactly what it's doing, so objects will bleed into each other as long as it still gives the impression of the goal object/output.

four: don't beat yourself up over it

in closing, a piece of AI art will almost always look "confident." it'll also almost look perfect and skilled in that way when first looking at it. and though it may be distractingly perfect in that first glance, it will likely look incredibly imperfect when you look closer. imperfect in the way an algorithm would mess up.

that's honestly a large part as to why many people don't pick up on what pieces are generated vs not. these pieces are eye-catching and skillfully presented enough to the point of people not noticing the finer details. the more "technically skilled" a piece is, the more often that people will gloss past the mistakes. how many times have you seen posts where someone says, "i find new things in this piece every time i look at it?" that's why. we're wired to look at the big picture, literally. and that's not anyone's fault. so don't beat yourself up over it or think you're an idiot if you weren't able to tell the difference.

remember: this is an insanely new thing. while image generating itself isn't necessarily new, and programs like photoshop and other image editing software have been using algorithms for many of their functions for probably well over a decade now, this specific type of image generation is still fresh. and it's constantly changing. unless you're in the tech space, you may not even realize the advancements being made, and that's okay! you can always learn more. just be alert and aware, as this will also help you combat a far more sinister issue, which is deep fakes and other false info being spread. double-check everything.

so those are the main methods to start with if you want to try and improve your generated image detection abilities! i hope this post was informative and helpful!

[maxg-longform]

Outer Wilds

A new frontier for the interactive experience

Moments in gaming which are truly ground-breaking are rare, and they are only getting rarer. A dual axiom of diminishing technological returns achieved by the jumps between console generations and the rampant predatory monetisation of the games as a service modal have had many despairing and looking to games that denounce photorealism and market trends for inspiration , in much the same way those in the art world despaired at the first cameras. As they could no longer make art more detailed technically, meaning and artistry moved from technique to statement. Why is it not photorealistic? The question posed today is the same. You could make a game that is an accurate reflection of life – or a biased reflection of a certain kind of life (Military-industrial complex funded shooters I’m looking at you) – so why have you chosen to instead create something with a particular art style? What is the combination of your narrative and design choices trying to say? 

In the case of Far Cry 5, when particular attention is paid to the fact that the cultists are under the influence of drugs for the game’s entirety in addition to Obsidian’s claims that their new game concerning corporate exploitation of space colonies is written apolitically with empathetic and ‘good’ characters on both sides, the aim is all too often to actively stop you from drawing any meaningful conclusion at all, or at the very least to give the impression that there is nothing to draw.

What is the aim of this spiel then? In reality, you don’t need context to enjoy Outer Wilds, but only within the nexus of the modern games industry can you see why I’ve grown to love it so much. It also lets me talk about the game in more abstract terms without spoiling it – as it is very hard not to spoil it in talking about it, as knowledge is the only progression system within the game. The game itself, mechanically, is very stripped back. You have a spaceship to explore the solar system with, a spacesuit with thrusters for exploring each of the planets you can land on, and a translation device, which allows you to understand the language of an ancient alien race which inhabited the solar system many years prior. The story orients you as the first of your race to explore the stars with this new translation device. Explorers has previously visited each planet in the solar system, but contact with them has been lost, and they cannot translate the language there. Your objective, insofar as you are given one, is to find them and learn about the ancient aliens. In an age where open-world games have quest markers and some, such as Skyrim, have a spell which paints a trail on the ground in the direction of the next objective, the handhold-free nature of Outer Wilds is charming and arresting.

Whenever you discover anything important, it is stored in your ship’s log at the back of your small spaceship. In a way, it reminded me of Morrowind, one of Skyrim’s forebears, with the journal giving hints as to where you ought to look, but no real help beyond collating what you already know so that you can easily reference it in future. You are free to explore any of the planets at any point, and follow any lines of inquiry you see fit. In a lesser game, this would lead to a disjointed narrative experienced so out of order that it would give Tarantino a headache. However, this leads me into talking about the level design. I could not laud any higher the way in which the planets are designed. Every planet has a dynamic twist to it you need to learn in order to be able to understand how to access information on it and each planet has areas that require you to piece together learnings from around the solar system in order to access. In every sense, the game rewards exploration and understanding as a means of progress, rather than giving you new tools and telling you how to use them. This is evident in each of the planet designs – which I will briefly explain in the order I visited them (there is no ‘proper’ order).

 Giant’s Deep 

 A swirling, green water planet with four islands, which are continually tossed around by an endless stream of cyclones which make the planet hard to navigate. The pole is protected by a ferociously large cyclone and a strong current prevents underwater exploration of a porous, but fiercely electromagnetic core. The sheer size and oppressive atmosphere is compounded by the strong gravity making it almost impossible to jump, incentivising careful exploration.

 Brittle Hollow

A hollow planet built around a black hole and beset by fiery meteors from its volcanic moon. With an inhospitable surface, much of the challenge comes from discovering how others adapted to these conditions previously, and how to use the gravity of the black hole to navigate a planet that slowly falls apart and disintegrates as the game goes on due to the constant meteor bombardment.

 The Wanderer

A frozen comet with an elliptical orbit that takes it within a lethal range of the sun, and covered in mysterious ‘ghost matter.’

 The Hourglass Twins

Two planets orbiting each other as they orbit the sun. One starts as a bare rock with many caves to explore; the other as a perfectly round desert planet, with absolutely zero to explore. Then, a large column of sand starts flowing through space from the desert planet ‘Ash Twin’ to the bare one, ‘Ember Twin.’ This means areas of each planet are only accessible at certain times, and you need to beware of the sand level when exploring caves.

 Dark Bramble

A planet consisting purely of thorny branches wrapped around a core that pulses with white light. Enter the hole, and caverns that bend the laws of space and time fill massive areas within. A Tardis of horrors, this planet scared me like no jump scares could. A truly eerie vibe – a memorable and haunting level unlike anything I’d ever played before.

 While every one of these planets is in its own way unique and memorable, as are the moments when you discover how to access parts of them you couldn’t before – the best example of the game’s genius comes in the form of a location known as the Quantum moon. Before you go to this location, there are three pieces of key knowledge you need. Without them, you shouldn’t even be able to land on it. Nevertheless, I accidentally managed to land on it early in the game. However, because I hadn’t yet solved how to get into the tower of Quantum knowledge on Brittle Hollow, I didn’t understand how to access where I wanted to go. The moon has a secretive ‘Sixth Location’ you wish to explore, but every time I tried to leave the control room, the way was blocked by rocks until the moon moved back to one of the five locations in our solar system. It wasn’t until a few hours later, when I was following a different lead on another planet that I figured out how to avoid the rocks, and also where I needed to go once I had made it out.

The game is filled with eureka moments, and the lack of handholding makes you feel like you have genuinely accomplished something when you solve a puzzle. For example, I discovered a much quicker shortcut to a key area called the Black Hole Forge. The game doesn’t penalise you for this; much of the beauty of the game comes in the journey. Translating the alien scriptures in each area contains hints as to the overarching story – which I won’t in any way spoil, except that it is moving, inspiring and heart-breaking in equal measure – but also contains deeply personal stories about the people who made these structures, these homes, these technologies. The tension among the clan as they tried debated their plans to achieve what they came to our solar system for. The romance and feeling amongst those who worked on their projects. The jubilation of breakthroughs and the let-downs of defeat. The struggle for life and the joys of overcoming the hostile worlds of the system. The heart-wrenching story of the Quantum moon. All pieced together in bitesize chunks, out of sequence, displaced. Abstractions anthropomorphised because we don’t know enough about them to truly contextualise them. You never even find out what these aliens looked like. But you discover their hopes, their aims, their dreams and their death – as you, the traveller from an antique land, stare at the vast and trunkless legs of stone.

Rather purposefully, I have been abstract in my descriptions and generalised the experience. In a game where knowledge is the means of progression, and real detail would be a spoiler, and its best to come into this game blind. So, I’ve chosen to focus on the feeling the game instils in you. It has a charming art direction, understated yet distinctive music that complements every area perfectly and a real warmth and passion that oozes from every pixel. In a world where every new innovation is immediately copied and run into the ground by every game in the same genre – the camp clearing from Far Cry 3 is now a chore in every vaguely open world game- or climbing the conveniently placed towers to gain map vision a la Assassin’s Creed – or that very same game series doing its very best Witcher 3 impression in Origins and Odyssey – there is an incorruptible heart to Outer Wilds. There will be games inspired by it, no doubt, but there won’t be other games that weaponise knowledge in quite the same way, or use it to explore the same themes. It’s a game about futility, about facing death but choosing to explore and challenge yourself and improve and, most importantly, to enjoy the little things and cherish the detail, to find pieces of light in that endless, futile dark.  

Games like this have always been few and far between, and are becoming even rarer now. That’s why it’s essential we cherish games like Outer Wilds. There is no formula for creating a masterpiece but when a game really connects with you, you know it, you feel it. My list of favourite games I’d consider a masterpiece is quite incongruent – SSX 3, Tony Hawk’s Underground, Assassins Creed 2, Halo 4 to pick out a few of the rather different ones –  but Outer Wilds has topped all of them, and I only spent around 12 hours with it. It strips gaming back to its essentials, while bringing new ideas to the table and presenting them in charming and arresting ways. You will never have another 12 hours like it. Its heart, soul and message are inimitable, and I sincerely urge you to open up to it and give it a try.

10/10

Played on Xbox - the game is available through Xbox Game Pass

@CoreLineage on twitter

[ansibleoftheuniverse]

Now, first of all, tell us why do you think Star Wars is superior to Star Trek?

Jordan: Well, Star Trek is grand in our own frame of reference, and as such suffers from the limit of our own tripe reality. In fact, Star Wars delves more into the world of fantasy and mythology and touches on some universal mythological beings that have been present across humanity since the beginning of time, you'll find that most cultures on Earth share a common mythology.

In fact, the Greek Odysseus was known as Ulysses in Rome, the Greek Zeus was known as Jupiter in Rome, the Greek Poseidon was known as Neptune in Rome, and you're talking about of a young farm-boy from the middle of nowhere that goes up against a great oppressor, and this story is common a lot in mythology, such as David and Goliath, and you'll find again that this touches the core human emotion that we all need to explore through a fantasy world those constants which we cannot achieve in our own reality world. Now, on another note, I find that the, uh, universal worldwide acceptance of Star Wars is grand in this commonality that we all share instead of being limited through one frame of reference, through one focal point, we can see things in a cross-cultural manner, if you will, and in fact, to expand on that a little bit, I think that you’ll find that the Star Wars Universe is relatable for any culture on Earth, any economic standing, any financial standing on Earth, because again, we’re talking about themes that are core to the concept of humanity and emotion. 

Furthermore, I can tell you that the types of themes that you’re talking about in Star Trek are limited towards a certain set of circumstances that exist, in almost a two-dimensional plane, wherein Star Wars you’re really exploring different feelings about humanity, happiness, sadness, all of the various spectrum of the human existence, and I find that even though you are talking about characters that are often not human, we as human beings can identify through their struggles, and you’ll find that most great storytelling has to deal with a protagonist, an ordinary person up against extraordinary odds, and I think that if you look at the literature across the history of recorded time, you’ll find that a lot of the greatest stories have followed that same theme. 

The storyline is almost unimportant, because you’re talking about grand themes here, about human achievement when faced with unlikely odds, and furthermore I can tell you that beyond that, it’s something that we can all agree upon, it is all something we can all identify with, and relatability, I’m sure you know, as someone that works in the storytelling world, is a concept that is necessary to have an audience invest themselves into the story that you’re telling. 

I’ll also tell you that the Star Wars Universe, while on some level is very exotic, had a musical soundtrack grounded in nineteenth-century romantic music, and in fact, I can relate Star Wars, the appeal of it, towards some of the great impressionist paintings like Dutch Van Gogh, because his paintings, although not photographic if you will, or photorealistic, inspired our own imagination to latch onto the concepts present in the painting. 

And for example, if you look at Van Gogh’s Starry Night, you’ll see that again, while it doesn’t necessarily look exactly like a city and stars, and the wind blowing through the trees, you can feel the feeling of what it was like to be in that situation. You know, unlike looking at a photograph, which again gives you that two-dimensional representation; a split second, a microsecond in time, if you will, and if anyone knows that’s had a bad photograph taken in a split second in time, doesn’t often represent the whole picture. However, when you’re talking about the idea of a painting, and certainly an oil painting, an impressionist oil painting, you’re not necessarily capturing all of the minute details, you’re capturing a feeling. 

Now, how do you put a feeling down on canvas? How do you put a feeling down on the screen? 

Well, that’s the job of the artistic storytelling, and in fact the storyteller in this case took his own human emotions, his own human struggles, and that of others, and put them into a fantastic circumstance, which none of us could have possibly experienced, yet, can all take pride in, relate to again, the young, struggling farm-boy wanting to be part of a- now these are the things that were touched upon in 1976’s Rocky, I’m talking about the original Rocky; it wasn’t about winning the fight, that movie’s not a boxing movie, that movie is about an ordinary guy placed in extraordinary circumstances; a guy… he was the underdog, you know, another common concept you find in a lot of literature. 

He was the underdog that wanted to make a- -all he wanted to do was go the distance. He wanted to make it to the Philadelphia (spectrum?). It probably has some corporate branded name now, but at the time in 1976, shot in 1975, it was called the Philadelphia (spectrum?) because theatres and arenas, amphitheaters, had real names back then, uhh, I think Fenway Park is still named as such Candlestick park, I’m sure it’s been renamed, I don’t really follow sports myself, but I’ve heard these terms said, and... 

I know that a lot of the original, like Shea Stadium, was like CitiBank Field, or something, but (clears throat) that’s not really relevant to what I’m talking about here, but uuhhhh… interesting nevertheless. 

However, umm, what I’m saying is that for an artist to accurately portray a feeling on film or canvas, or whatever the medium; I mean, you could be talking about a mound of clay, really the artistic medium is irrelevant, and when a singer gets up and sings, you don’t care about the vocal cords vibrating at certain frequencies, you’re trying to take part in or relate to a certain feeling that that artist is trying to convey. 

When a sculptor takes a look at a hunk of mud and clears away certain sections to make this great monolith of art, again, it’s not about the minerals that are present in the mud, it’s about the feeling that you’re trying to convey. 

Conan: You’re fired. Get the f*** out of here and never come back.