VFX Artists Expose AI Scams

October 14, 2024 2:40 AM

Visual Effects channel the Corridor Crew (previously) look at AI scams and how to identify them (25 minutes)
posted by TheophileEscargot (5 comments total)

One part that struck me as interesting was the way AI images are generally high contrast, with bright areas and dark areas always averaging out to a medium tone. You never see AI images that are mostly dark with one bright spot.

I'm wondering if that is hard to fix issue because of the way they create the images by putting noise in a blank image and mutating each pixel according to the algorithm? Or could they just start with a black image and create a dark result with one bright spot if they wanted?
posted by TheophileEscargot at 5:28 AM on October 14

Yeah, it does seem like it's related to the distribution of noise but I won't pretend to understand it exactly.
posted by BungaDunga at 7:36 AM on October 14 [1 favorite]

Interesting! The abstract says "In Stable Diffusion, it severely limits the model to only generate images with medium brightness and prevents it from generating very bright and dark samples" which is basically what the video says.

That paper suggests it would be relatively straightforward to fix though, so I think we can't rely on "medium brightness" to identify AI images forever.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 7:55 AM on October 14 [1 favorite]

Thanks for linking to this! It's interesting to see AI artifacts being revealed by professionals, but we are now in an arms race, so people developing the next generation of AI will make sure that it doesn't display these telltale signs.
posted by Termite at 11:47 AM on October 14

In a way, it's nice to see that the scammy product design is using AI art, and not just stealing it directly from real artists like they used to do.
posted by surlyben at 12:40 PM on October 14