I just looked for ai slop on the internet and some videos are very realistic, so realistic it makes me doubt my ability to discern what’s real from what’s created to play with my emotions and generate money for the creator or advance an agenda.
I’m in my 40s. Video sites are full of what I assume overconfident people younger than me with comments like how boomers would believe any of these videos. I’m not that old myself yet but this stuff is scary. It can be used to denigrate a politician, to demonize or ridicule minorities, to share misinformation, to make porn using the face of somebody who rejected a disgruntled man…
It’s also very sad society actually wants this. It shows lots of people are actually very gullible and stupid.
A better question would be, how do I avoid being gullible with images and video so realistic? Because the more technology advances the worse it’s going to get.
It’s getting harder and harder but some things still seem to work:
- emotional emphasis on the wrong syllables
- dissonance between facial expressions and vocal delivery
- AI writing giveaways (it’s not A it’s B etc.)
- dreamlike / “floaty” motion
- unrealistic “depth of field” (objects don’t blur properly with distance)
- unrealistic lighting / coloring / appears stylized despite the attempted hyperrealism
- object permanence problems / subtle drift in sizes and proportions over time
The last one is the big giveaway but it can be hard to spot. Look for things going out of frame or going behind other objects. Do they come back when they should? Have they changed?
For example: there are three people in the background and a bus drives by, obscuring them completely. Are they still there when the bus moves on?
I’ll add another one: multiple vanishing points. As models will pull different parts of images from different sources, perspective can be inconsistent across the image.
A better question would be, how do I avoid being gullible with images and video so realistic?
Honestly, we’re quickly moving into “assume AI unless proven otherwise” territory.
The same way you know if there’s the Fae.
- Count the fingers
- Look for irregularities
- See where the glamour shimmers
- Ask them for their name
Lettering can give it away also.
GenAI doesn’t have problems with fingers anymore, as far as I know.
It does, but less often
That guys voice.
Plus, minor grammatical errors. eg. “Has increased the Tens of times”
Also, Bruce Lee having a fight.
That woman’s voice too.
And it’s not just Bruce Lee having a fight.
It’s angry conceited Martial Arts fighter picks random person out of a crowd for a demonstration,
who happened to be none other than calm collected Bruce Lee, yet no one knew who he was,
with 4k grayscale picture quality and at all angles of the dojo, including on individual audience members themselves, plus repetitive ‘damaged film’ effects for 20th century authenticity.I don’t understand why an AI would make grammatical errors. Isn’t that the one thing they’re supposed to be good at?
Checking the channel that uploaded can also give a clue. A lot of the slop channels just flood variations of the same thing. They just post a thousand generated videos of different dog doing the exact same thing or “people” having the exact same fight etc.
Sorting videos by oldest can help too, if their first video predates AI it’s probably a decent indicator the channel is real
Don’t assume that recognizing fakes is a younger generation thing. Maybe the people spotting them grew up reading snopes and alt.folklore.urban so that they have a good idea of how urban legends, hoaxes and clickbait are constructed.
Start with the assumption the video is fake. Do you trust the source? If the video is of something outrageous, did you notice something feels uncanny? Does the lighting, shot angle, and proportions make sense?
If the answer is not yes, no, yes then it’s probably AI
This is pretty much it. Everything is fake unless you can prove it’s not
They always look a bit shiny/glossy
It’s worth pointing out that whatever tips you get here, accurate though they may be today, are likely to be less accurate with time and this tech is improving at a rapid pace so if this is important to you, you’ll have to keep on top of what techniques for discernment are current at any given time or if there even remain any reliable techniques at all.
Looks like eventually it’s all going to come down to context and your assessment of the trustworthiness of the source. If something is so sensational it seems unbelievable and you don’t have much trust in the source from which you saw it, it probably is literally unbelievable until further corroboration emerges. This is a pretty exhausting model when modern live involves so much media consumption but I’d advise that there’s also an element of practicality you should incorporate in to your evaluation. You’ll have to decide if the answer to the question “is this AI?” is important for any given situation before actually investing any time or energy in to answering it. Sometimes you might get the calculation wrong and it turned out that by assuming something was innocuous enough not to matter one way or the other you ended up being misinformed about something that actually was important but at the end of the day we’re only mere mortals and can sometimes be wrong.
Alot of voices are still pretty bad, like words and voice sound good, but their tone and emphasis is off for what they are saying.
I would add that, when you listen to an AI conversation, there are no pauses. Like they know exactly what to say before the other person is done talking. Most humans have a natural pause to think about what was just asked.
Because even on the best drugs, my cat never says those things. He just refuses to cut the blue wire out of spite.
Whenever I don’t like the video or the person in it it’s ai.
discern what’s real from what’s created to play with my emotions and generate money for the creator or advance an agenda.
Not mutually exclusive.
When AI can make a convincing facsimile of something, that thing in its genuine form is already hollow and manipulative.
I would be concerned with the type of media I’m consuming in the first place if ai can make it problematic
This video by Corridor Digital breaks it down pretty well for less tech-savvy people, but they have more videos that go in greater depth about spotting AI trickery.
