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Ask HN: Is there a reliable way to tell if an image is AI generated?

8 points by leandrobon ↗ HN
Is there any reliable way to determine whether an image is AI-generated (or AI-edited) versus a real photo that’s been compressed, resized, or edited? Detectors seem brittle and disagree, is there anything that’s dependable enough to automate, or the answer is that you can’t tell from pixels alone?

4 comments of 9

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downbad_
I struggle to tell. And the AI image generators are only going to get better. I fear we are going to spend the next years debating if something is real or AI.

I read an online conversation where people said that billionaires like those in the Epstein files would have loved to use the excuse that the implicating images of them were AI generated by Epstein.

Bender
I don't know how reliable this is but one can upload an image to a few different AI's and ask if it was AI generated.
rolph
halos, of hue or regional variations of pixel "jagginess", reflections that dont correspond to the environment, distortions of the 2D pixel area that dont agree with underlying 3D structure.
daemonologist
Google watermarks their images; I believe it's a sort of subtle rainbow striping that can survive basic filters/transforms. https://deepmind.google/models/synthid/ Other providers might do something similar but I'm not aware of any.

Otherwise no. There are lots of common tells, and some classifiers that might be better than guessing (at least within a given test set) but nothing reliable.