Begging people to stop reblogging this AI trash from “The Phantom Painter” on Instagram (instagram.com/phantom.painting). I’ve been seeing it on my dash more and more often from people who are otherwise anti-AI and either can’t tell it’s AI or don’t care because it looks cool.

This is the kind of shit that is VERY CLEARLY trained on the works of existing talented artists’ with distinct styles and this asshole is selling prints and making a profit off of stealing other people’s hard work.

Don’t give people like this money or attention and they will go away.

Please, if you’re going to buy art prints, buy them from an actual artist.

@thegnat That’s the problem, it’s getting really hard to tell what’s AI and what isn’t. This phantom painter person at least says on each post on Instagram that it was created with AI, but when people re-post it on tumblr, it isn’t specified, and people end up reblogging it.

It’s not reasonable to think everyone should be vetting every single art they reblog to make sure it isn’t AI, which is why I made this post to let people know this artist specifically is AI, and I see it reblogged a ton.

While we’re at it

and so is everything by that person, xis.lanyx on Instagram. They also sell prints of their “original images”

That last one is for the people saying “you can always tell by the hands.” You cannot. The whole point is that it’s getting better and better at it. That’s what it does.

As an art curator on tumblr I now have to spend a considerable amount of time trying to decipher whether or not the art I want to share is AI or not and I still sometimes get it wrong.

To actually answer the question of how one can determine something is AI, particularly as it grows more sophisticated with anatomy: you have to train yourself to recognize artifacts.

There is no one single unifying giveaway beyond a strange sense of uncanny that you will eventually begin to recognize the better you attune yourself, and certain models have their own unique “styles” you can begin to recognize (midjourney and stablediffusion produce very different looks, for example). There are however a few things on which one can tend to focus.

• Edges: AI, as of this post, still struggles with distinct edges of objects and figures and has a tendency to blend details together. Look for hair, ribbons, and other flowy details if present. Do they fade into other details? Look at how the hair fuses with the smoke:

• Edges 2: Sometimes they will also have the edges completely avoid each other, with a foreground figure slightly warping along the edges in a way that matches the background edges, like repelling magnets:

• Patterns: AI, as of this post, still struggles with patterns. Filigrees, mandalas, brickwork, scales, anything that involves a high level of intricate detail tends to get blurred together. This can be a tricky one, because a lot of artists will also fudge pattern details in looser renders, but usually in a way that makes sense as an impression and not…. this:

• Architecture: Are there buildings present in the image? AI has a tendency to make Escher-esque nonsense structures, with pillars in places they don’t belong, arches that go nowhere, bricks that don’t align, and support beams that start on one plane and connect to another. It also struggles with perspective, but, so do many humans so I would not consider it evidence alone. Check out the placement of this pillar, and also the detail on the… window? Candle cage?? Thing?

• Resolution and quality: AI cannot make high-resolution images. It just cannot. While most artists aren’t posting their full resolutions, generative images can’t be enhanced, and the “artist” will not be able to provide proof of work. You should be able to zoom into work by an artist and admire their strokes, relate to their errors, and appreciate their process at every skill level– zooming into generative images somehow makes them even less clear, a mess of pixels that are somehow both blurry and also look like they have been run through a sharpen filter:

• Text and signatures: AI struggles with legible characters in any language, and the result is a simlish-looking approximation of characters at worst, and hilariously misspelled words at best. Since these models are trained off real artists, they will also often have artifacts of a signature that oopsed its way into the image. These signatures are always illegible or, if “legible”, are not actually the names of real accounts.

Things like this can be tough to spot at a glance if you’re not actively keyed into looking for them, but they’re the type of uncanny stuff that once you see it will start gnawing at the back of your mind. You’ll be scrolling your feed and suddenly take -1 psychic damage and you have to scroll back up to see why. Stuff that goes beyond inconsistent lightsources and bad anatomy.