Other
Can You Differentiate AI Art From Real Photos?
It has been a year or so since we talked about AI, but with ChatGPT’s latest release and Google’s imagen 3, it was time to reapproach the conversation. I’ll pretend I am okay with AI, mainly as a workflow tool to help us create our work faster, but the art generation tools will forever concern me for my career as a photographer. But AI has made a lot of large leaps since we were making fun of its hands a couple of years ago, so it was time to look at it a little further.
If you’ve been on social media in the last few months, you’ve probably been bombarded with AI art again. From Studio Ghibli’d images to action figures of all your friends, you’ve probably seen more than your share of AI-generated art. However, one thing not as loudly discussed is the other advancements AI art has made over the last few months, and perhaps some of the biggest jumps have come in realism, not just action figure toys.
So why discuss this? Well, because AI will absorb some markets in photography and videography if it hasn’t started already. As someone who grew up in the ’90s, I was taught my Rage Against the Machine (irony in the name, I know) to Know Your Enemy. So, it’s worth looking at AI art once again. Still, instead of giving you a million examples of where and how it improved, I wanted to test to see if you could identify real images from AI-generated images, so that you can see firsthand how far AI has improved.
So, how did you do in the quiz? All of the AI images were generated with either ChatGPT’s 4o image generator or Google’s Imagen 3, though several other tools provide similar results. Both tools are currently free to demo and give remarkable results.
Tips for Differentiating AI Art from Photos
The biggest concern with AI art is its own ability to implement machine learning. Whereas we only get a theoretical 24 hours a day to improve our work, AI can develop and improve millions of instances a day, making its growth continue astronomically. However, there are a few things that AI art still struggles with, so let’s look at some of its problem areas to help us distinguish between real work and AI work.
Quantity Based
One of the continual problems the AI art generation faces is in quantity, though it is continually improving. For instance, in the past, AI art would struggle with getting the correct number of fingers correct, or perhaps the correct placement of knuckles and joints in the fingers. While they’ve improved on this quite a bit (especially so if you got a few of those questions wrong above), they can still struggle with other things of the same nature. If it’s a group photo, they might add a phantom hand on someone’s shoulder or an extra leg in the mix of limbs. These are always good indicators of AI art.
General Softness & Low Resolution
AI art takes immense computing power to generate, and it still hasn’t streamlined this problem. So often, AI art is limited in resolution and detail. If you’re questioning the work’s validity, check its overall resolution, look for fine details, and see if you can find that sharpness in areas where it’s common in photos.
Repetition
To further expand on the tip above, AI art often uses repetition to help speed up the generation process. So you may see something copied several times over the same image. While this can also be done because of human error (We’ve all gotten lazy with the clone stamp tool in Photoshop), it’s more commonly seen in AI art.
Asymmetry
Asymmetry exists in all facets of life, but especially so in AI art. When photographing a building, for example, you often want to photograph the building so that it looks symmetrical across the plane. AI doesn’t understand these rules and often creates subtle symmetry shifts in its images. This can be particularly difficult to see, especially as AI improves, but it’s a key indicator of AI art.
These are just a few tips on how to differentiate AI art from real works of art created by humans. Do you have any tips of your own? Feel free to share them in the comments below, and of course, share your scores on the quiz above, too!
