These are not photos: landscapes created by new AI
petapixel.com
petapixel.com
Are there any other major tells that this is AI, especially for the photos that don’t show reflections?
I think the AI tech is really cool, and I’m sure they’ll figure out how to train accurate reflections if prints of AI landscapes start making money, but to me in this specific case, there’s something a little depressing about an auto-generated picture of a place you can’t go. The reason that good landscapes are wonderful is because they were captured, and it’s an aspirational image of somewhere you can visit. The story of the photo’s origin really matters in a lot of cases, which is true for art as well as photos, and is the main thing missing from AI imagery.
And remember, these are the “best of the best” examples. I’m sure there are many more that have very obvious flaws.
But to include wrong reflections seems like an obvious error that the creators or author should have caught.
This is always what's left out of the discussion. When I purchase art, it's always from local artists. I like the art, but I also really like hearing about their process, or their inspiration, or whatever it is. It feels nice to be let into a part of the artists' lives.
I just can't be convinced that AI will ever replace that feeling.
The lighting doesn't match on most of these pictures. Some mountains look like hills upscaled to a size of a mountain - erosion doesn't work like that. The long exposure ocean picture looks terrible because waves look static as if they were flowing over some rocks, but there doesn't seem to be any rocks. The waterfall and volcano picture is just terrible in every way, I'd call it a fantasy photobash if I didn't know it's an AI output.
I'm sure there will be models that are much better at imitating landscape photos, but all pictures in the article are pretty obviously generated, probably except for the ice cave which is pretty good I think.
I see it as a similar phenomenon. Personally I don’t give a damn if something is off or not, clearly noticeable or hidden. Why would I? What’s the point of the art/painting/photo/etc following some arbitrary rules? All these pics would make a fantastic zero-cost background for a novel, a quest or whatever.
But it can still eliminate the livelihoods of a great many commercial artists.
Edit: For context, the original reply (now deleted) was about how magic mushrooms were easily obtainable.
I just can't understand this need to remove reality from reality. But this may be due to the fact that I seem to become a grumpy old cynical white man.
Interesting thought! Not sure how to feel about it.
1. faces aren't perfectly symmetric. There is a bunch of leeway on the small scale
2. faces can be oriented to make lack of symmetry harder to see (most photos aren't people perfectly facing the camera)
3. faces can be parametrized with relatively few parameters. You need correct position and sizing for eyes, nose, mouth, eyebrows and ears. If you get those right, everything else is doable based only on local information. For a mountain range reflection, you need to transfer a ton of exact information across the image (and that information can't easily be embedded in 2d. to know the reflection, you have to have a 3d map).
I think the biggest challenge is that unlike facial symmetry, reflected mountains in training sets are often significantly perturbed by ripples and objects in the water. So tones in the water broadly matching the tones of the mountains above but with different texture is "good enough" for the model, and it doesn't catch finer detail mismatches in shapes of edges in the same way it catches finer detail mismatches in the shapes of eyes, which almost invariably have the same texture and similar lighting to their compatriot in images.
One possible reason the same approach might not work in both cases could be that DALLE’s training set has more faces than landscapes with still water lakes, it’d have to learn these two symmetry constraints through enough clear examples in both cases, and no counter-examples. I can imagine counter-examples for both faces and landscapes that could potentially inhibit learning symmetry, like faces from an angle or side view, or landscapes with an occluder, but I have no idea how often these occur in DALLE’s training set. Getting this right means that DALLE somehow needs to learn the concept and the symmetry constraint from all the imagery, it has to understand the world a little, not just have pixels to borrow. It’s a hard problem, and at some level surprising how well it’s doing with the landscapes.
I would bet that the same will happen with AI-generated images; people will learn to tell the signs, and artists will have to learn to avoid these.
But then maybe that's just a result a overstuffed prompts being fed in.
It's also very interesting to see both perspective and reflection inconsistencies, but how many of these aren't obvious at first glance -- only after you look for a couple of seconds.
Edit: You are best off looking this up in Google Images, his website is quite slow.
For those looking for a video, see https://youtu.be/jF76LmzY7YY?t=468, which I would not have believed could be natural.
Any service generating imagery must keep an archive of such imagery for X years. FCC (or similar) penalty for publishing any image that was matched to an AI without attribution or with steganographic information missing would rival DCMA costs.
Why? Most users won't care, but news agencies will get caught red handed posting these as real / without thinking about the repercussions. By keeping an archive, a reverse image search would trivially and automatically catch them.
But seriously - how would your system work with any open-source AI, or leaked proprietary AI? It wouldn't. The best you could do is sue someone and claim they had an unlabelled AI image, and hire an expert to try to make a case to rebut against their expert. It just falls apart and the legal system probably isn't interested in figuring out by minor artifacts whether that is AI or just compression, distortion, a bad photoshop job, a prank, etc. This is especially important as AI gets more imperceptible in the future. If I take an AI generated face, and shrink it by 50%, all artifacts are plausibly compression, not that the AI had bad hair edge generation, so you can't prove I had an AI. Too many loopholes.
A proper response would be, I argue, simply basing the penalties on the harm caused. Doesn't matter whether the image was made by Photoshop, AI, or an experienced photographer with camera tricks, the harm is the cost.
Edit: I keep adding more reasons, but here's another. This proposal would basically ban remixing AI images because embedding it inside another Photoshopped image, putting your face in the AI photo, resizing it, so forth might mess with the watermark. And naturally, any software capable of preserving the watermark could be easily altered to remove it, and many of these watermarks work solely by their secretive design, so good luck seeing the algorithms ever in your open-source package. Practically banning remixing of different types of photos in open-source software is a terrible idea.