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May 2023

While surffing reddit I came upon a guide which made a pretty good job explaining some things you should do to detect good ai art.
Feel free to add your 2 cents of knowledge on how to detect good ai art.

Many times it is fairly easy to distinguish human art from Ai art. We simply have to look at the hands or the eyes of the drawing.

Image created on NightCafe with the prompt "Byzantine style portrait of Mary and baby Jesus wearing halos in front of a faded gold background."

But should that be all? Should that be the first thing we look at?

One of these images was Ai generated while the other 2 were made by human. The Ai generated one was the second image on NightCafe with the prompt "Two elderly men playing cards at a table at an outdoor cafe." The prompt was inspired by Paul CĂ©zanne's painting "The Card Players."
The first image was painted by Jonathan Bentham. While the third image was done by Kelly McKernan.

That was fairly easy wasn't it? But what about the next two images?

One simple look will not help you distinguish which one is Ai generated. Sure one image has green circles giving away the errors. But what if I told you both are Ai generated?

If I can't just simply look at the hands or the eyes then how can I distinguish if it is Ai generated?

A reddit user created a good guide to identify scarily good ai art. I took both the last images from there. Here is the link https://www.reddit.com/r/AnimeSketch/comments/z9hmgf/how_to_identify_scarilyaccurate_ai_generated/499

In that link the user explains why they circled in green those errors but they never really explained which things to look for on the image of the anime girl waving hi.

To further add to what the user said. When detecting if something is Ai generated art you should look for 4 red flags.

1.- The user does not share the credits of the artist. This can mainly be seen with novel covers. Not sharing the credits does not mean it is Ai generated. It just means that you should be watchful of said user.
2.- Look for a watermark. Ai generators often leave a discrete watermark. It is usually small and it can be found at the bottom of the image. But you would have to really zoom in to find it. It could look like letters or a small logo it varies from ai genrator to ai generator. Some don't have a watermark.
3.- Look for things that don't blend in. It could be a style change in the art. Or it could be that the image just randomely dissapears the feet and hands of a character. This can also apply to objects.
4.- Things don't look natural and the artist is making newb mistakes when their art is pretty good. It could be something simple like a kiss looking weird. Instead of a kiss it may look like they are just pressing lips. Maybe a body part is turning in an unatural way. Like their head or feet. Or maybe you found other red flags that make you think something just doesn't belong with the level of art implemented.

There are Ai art detectors that may help us with detecting if something was made by Ai. But are they trustworthy? The answer is... it depends. Each detector works differently. And they work like plagerism detection programs.

On the next example I ran the 3 images found on the reddit link and I ran them through https://huggingface.co/spaces/umm-maybe/AI-image-detector218

As you can see only one image gave a high artificial % while the other 2 gave either a 3% artificial or even a 0% artificial.

Well if that detector can't tell if it is artificially made how can I?

The image with the green circles is perfectly explained on the redit link I gave before.
Here I shall explain how to distinguish that the waving anime girl was Ai generated. For that we will need to zoom in and look for the inconsistencies.

Between the thumb and the scarf you can find a weirdly placed object. It could be a nail or a hair or something else. But it is nonetheless an error you would not notice without zooming in.

There is a strangely weird V shape in the hand. And the thumb is strangely pointy.

There is a random hair that was generated in the girls bangs. Normally there would be no problems. But on this case it just doesn't seem like something that belongs in the image.

The lighting on this particular part of the drawing just doesn't belong on the image. Part of the shirt also blends with the color of the skin.

Again part of the shirt is blending with the color of the skin.

A button that should clearly be there is obviously missing.

The distance between the buttons is not consistent and if that wasn't enough the shape of some buttons is weird.

The eyes are not consistent with one another. The eye which got circled has 2 problems. The lower eyelid looks as if someone dragged it a little bit up with photoshop. The most important tell is looking at how squiggly the pupil is.

All of these are very small details that a person can easily miss. Ai art has advanced a lot and you can easily train it to make pretty good hands and faces.
The image I used as an example was generated using stable diffusion.

Hopefully, all that I mentioned plus the reddit link can help you detect scarily good Ai.

Extra: What should I do if I ever get accused of using Ai?

Don't panic. Just save evidence. It could be a timelapse, each version of your art in which you made significant progress, hand made sketches, or just something that solidly proves that you created said image (even other art you have done can help since it proves how consistent you are with your artstyle). Presenting a digital sketch may not be proof enough as Ai can also generate digital sketches plus filters can also be used to create such false evidence. That is why we should always save more definite evidence.
Most comic artists won't have to worry about being accused since their artstyle is very consistent through several chapters. Something Ai is not capable of doing yet.

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Tbh, "saving the timelapse" is a bit of a ridiculous advice, in my opinion. Unless you are doing it constantly, you won't just randomly start filming yourself drawing just in case someone would decide to accuse you of using generated art.

Corrected it. You are right people could take it on a literal sense instead of a guide. Hopefully now people will think of just saving solid evidence.

I notice another way to detect AI art is looking at the eyes and cropping.

The program Art Breeder will center the eyes in the middle and will crop the head like this. Additionally, they often exist in a weird void.

You can tell when a realistic portrait is AI.
Notice the eyes being centered, the cropping, and the void. Also weird uncanny of "something seems off".

You know I might go against the common thought, but I don't think AI is that bad for references / inspiration only. People who commission with AI are just --- a piece of work. I saw it on fiverr where people charge 20 - 30$ to throw some words in a generator. And people pay for that stuff. AI is scary good and scary bad. I think reference / inspiration wise it can actually be quite useful. But other than that it is nothing but a thief.

For inspiration and to have a good time. I personally believe it is fine. The problem starts when people try to charge for said things making it pass as their own.

Like lets say someone takes a famous character and tries to sell merch of it without paying royalties. There's a difference between that and just using that character as a reference or simply using that character to create fanart which you won't profit from.

The only problem with Ai is that people don't see that using their art is like taking a random picture of the internet and claiming it as your own.
No self respecting artist would take a random piece of art on the internet and sell it to other people as if they had made it. They can however take that same image and use it as a reference.

In the same way no serious webnovelist would take a random image from google/instagram and use it as a cover. They can however use such images as inspiration to help design the concept of their own cover.

Ai images are pretty much like taking any random image from google or a random instagram account. At least that is how I see it. The important thing is how you use said image. Will you use it as a reference or will you simply take that image and sell it to another person? Same with covers. Will you use said image as reference or will you use it as a cover?

Yeah your right you should really look at the eyes and especially the fingers, but I wonder as AI becomes more advanced and will soon be able to draw without mistakes, will we be able to tell AI art from the work of an artist.

Good question. The most likely answer is no. Once Ai gets advanced enough it will even surpass humans just like how machines surpassed humans when it comes to manufacturing. Will it replace all artists? Probably not. Hand made products can be better since they focus on quality instead of quantity. Ai art will be similar in that way.

I do believe laws will start being created so that Ai programs will need to pay royalties for the art they borrow. Similar to how the music industry asks you to pay royalties for many things.

We won't see a huge jump yet in Ai art. For Ai (in general) to truly advance we need quantum computers.
Once those become available to the public Ai will have a scary advancement in all sections.

As of now what is beleived to be the closest threat for the destruction of humanity is Artificial Intelligence. AI has a long way to go but quantum computers would advance Ai in an exponential manner.

Fun fact quantum computers already exist but they are not ready to be mass produced (especially since you need to keep the qubits at almost 0°K). Problems that take years to solve with a standard computer takes only seconds on a quantum computer. That is the reason why Ai would evolve to the next step if we involve quantum technology.

In the paying jobs: Yes. Guaranteed. Corporations will look at the costs of hiring and supporting talents (not just drawing, music and acting as well) and will inevitably choose a small room with a shelf of hard drives in it. They are based on greed and operate on greed, they despise their workers, and an AI on a server is as close to owning slaves as they can happily get.

Since the public has shown time and again they'll dance to anything and watch anything, the second Fake Drake drops a club banger, they're not going to give a shit it only took an executive two minutes of filling out dropdown menus. And the closer to free it is, the more likely they'll support it.

The only future for human artists getting paid is what you're seeing here around you: Small communities of diehards, shucking and jiving even harder then they are now, for the few remaining paying Patreon customers. But paying $20 for a drawing of you D&D character or some "free" detailed AI generated one WOTC is providing on their site? C'mon.

Once the multi-fingers and the odd lines get sorted... and it is going to happen within a couple of years... folks can pretty much kiss the Big Tiddy Anime Girl commissions goodbye... For example.

You can kiss Webtoon and Tapas goodbye as well once they figure out how to generate Korean Netflix shows with AI.

I give it ten years. Fifteen on the outside.

I know for a fact that my semi-regular gig drawing characters for a card game has stopped because they're using AI.

I do hope that most people will realize how souless AI art is once they get enough of it, but that's also why it's important to flight for better copyright laws against AI, so they have less to skim off of from human artist.

To add to what @river121693 said, just in case this gets brought up - because it always inevitably does, usually by someone with a gallery full of fanart and a following made exclusively by drawing copyrighted IP:

Copyright laws serve small artists AND large corporations alike. The reason why it only looks as if the corporations get all the benefit, is because that copyright law mainly protects from corporate infringement - and up until recently, corporations KNEW it was unprofitable to try and infringe on already-existing IP. Most small artists never had to engage in active enforcement of copyright laws to protect their own intellectual property, because its existence alone was enough to passively protect them from the most likely (and most devastating) culprit to engage in it. Corporations have the time and resources to go after small-time crooks and people stupid enough to not respect a warning shot, but those small-timers were never the real threat in terms IP theft.

It's not a standard, as far as I know, csp can record your progress but it's not turned on by default (and good cause it's an additional load on your hardware) and with photoshop you need 3rd party recording software

This. I occasionnally film my screen for shorter paintings with obs but I'm running photoshop on a 5yo laptop, filming makes layers bug out and risks crashing the computer if I use it on bigger projets. Filming a timelapse on every single piece is unrealistic for people who don't have the best hardware.

Also, both me and my friends have been accused on our youtube channels of faking our speedpaints, despite having multiple speedpaints on there with consistent style and progress. Some people just find the youtube shorts, see they're good, and assume it's fake. The average joe doesn't have much of a barometer of what realistic progress looks like in art, nor what's easy vs hard to fake, which is totally normal, they've never tried any method.

Note: "speedpainting" is the colloquial term used on the internet for when you screenrecord you digital painting process and then post it to youtube. Not to be confused with the concept art term of "speed painting" which is a rush of putting ideas to paper in the form of quick, essentialist drawing, often focusing on silhouette and core details, usually digital or in ink.

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ain't they technically "time-lapse" since speed painting means getting something done in a short time

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I disagree.
In jobs like animation and concept art you get laughed out of town if you come in with AI stuff. Multiple studios have openly mocked job applications from "AI artists" because the human element of those jobs is necessary, because they're hiring you specifically to be able to stay on model in sequence (something AI is criminally bad at doing) and make recognisable unique characters and places (something AI art can't do because everything is a generic mishmash of everything in existence).

The other problem for companies is that AI art is uncopyrightable because only art made by a human has enough creative value to be copyrighted (see the ruling on the monkey selfie from the early 2010s). If they have no way to protect their core IP, that's very shaky ground to build a company on. Like if they get popular, any massive merch company could just make a worldwide run of their "official art" without licencing or anything with no legal repercussions and that's a massive loss of revenue.

It will however be detrimental to small-time personal commission work... A little. The type of client that wants a drawing cheap and quick and doesn't care what style it IS or who it's from will go for AI.

News flash: they're bad clients. We don't want those clients either. They're the worst, they pressure you, try to swindle you out of money, complain at every occasion that you're too expensive, demean you to try and lower your self esteem to get you to give up on more money.

Saying that AI art will replace artists is like saying roombas will replace human cleaners, when nearly everyone who buys one couldn't afford a cleaner in the first place.

@AmeTsunami yeah, most of programs don't, as @moontokkym just said, it's problematic for PS users :slight_smile: I think CSP just had this feature too recently? But I am not sure, but it had none before.

AI will not replace all artists.

AI will have a huge impact on supply and demand just like every other technical development
and there are some jobs which are more affected by it and some less. But that´s just part of the
business and is nothing new. Every decade has completely new technical possibilities and new
jobs popping up and old jobs changing or disappearing.

I read a lot of very radical opinions of people about AI and how it is already destroying every
creative job and so on and that often makes me think that I live in a completely different universe
that those people