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Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

Pretty much all the photos of water reflecting mountains are obviously fake because the reflections are wrong. Seeing the wrong mountains & clouds in the reflection kinda triggers me a little bit, I wouldn’t want to have prints of these.

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.

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I was actually surprised at how good the reflections are, given that the model has no "understanding" of what a reflection is or of the underlying three-dimensional space implied in each image. There are peaks that don't quite match up (the first example is probably the worst, with an entire extra peak), but overall, it's remarkably accurate for having no concrete ruleset for the domain it's working in.

FWIW, I totally agree with this. It’s quite good as a quick ‘impression’, and amazing that it knows to generate something similar in the reflection. This is just one of those things that separates fake from real. Even though it’s subjectively pretty good, it’s not good enough imagery from my perspective to use or to call it indistinguishable from a photo. It all depends on what the goal is, but the title of the piece does make the claim ‘these are not photos’, which from my perspective is establishing the goal posts and easy in this case to argue. The reasons that this is surprisingly good is an example of the story behind the image, it’s surprisingly good when you know how the image was made. In that sense I’m a little bit wrong above about the AI imagery lacking a story. ;)

It may have a vague understanding of things that have mirrored symmetry though, as many things do. And so this concept of reflections that sort of have mirrored symmetry is causing it to overassume that it's like other things.

>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.

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.

Interesting. It looks basically like what you'd expect if a "reflection" pattern had evolved in nature (e.g. on a butterfly wing). It looks like a reflection, but logically it does not make sense. It just has the right construction of shapes and colors to fool a not-too-discerning observer.

>Are there any other major tells that this is AI, especially for the photos that don’t show reflections?

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.

Despite having read this comment prior to clicking the article I have to admit that it took a while before I noticed that the ones with reflections were off.

I’m probably extra sensitive to it; I’m both an amateur photographer and do computer graphics professionally (i.e. study the physics of reflections). Physically, reflections will always align vertically given a horizontal mirror surface, so the very first image in the article is a really pretty extreme example of incorrect reflections. It hit me immediately and pretty hard before I even had a chance to scroll and see the rest of the images. The cloud in the reflection is in the wrong place and the reflection has a big underside shadow that doesn’t exist. The mountain peaks don’t match, especially visible on the peak on the left, and the sun-lit unshadowed parts of the mountain don’t match. Once you start to see these things, it becomes second nature to recognize them and hard to unsee them. :P I used to have a kids book with an illustration that had a reflection of the moon clearly in the wrong place, and it drove me nuts.

The one where waves in the sea look like long-exposure photos of a waterfall are also pretty clearly wrong to the observer. It's funny that there is such a fundamental disconnect between the lifetime of the waves and the scene, similarly to the wrong reflections.

It's not the art photography prints they have to replace. It's the millions of times a day a business reaches for an image to throw a brochure together or create a YouTube thumbnail or uses a matte painting for video compositing, or does a sky replacement. And especially in cases where the businesses want to have sole ownership of the image and not a stock license.

That’s one great reason to want AI generated imagery, and I even suspect will prove to be the primary business model for these kind of pixels, at least initially. But, speaking personally, I really hope our stock photos end up with better reflections than this. And I hope we don’t end up with a bunch of stock photos everywhere that are fake, it can be misleading in so many ways to use fake images, even for cheesy corporate brochures, and it’s disappointing and cheap for companies to want content without paying for it. Ultimately it does cheapen the original authors’ work and undermine the market for creative work if AI can pump out similar stuff that manages to skirt copyright while simultaneously copying.

It’s interesting that things like that are important to some and are completely ignored by the others. It reminds the eternal game engine enhancements race where people look for what’s most realistic with every release. Meanwhile, a dos game from the nineties has no realism conceived in it and expects either a pure power of imagination or in most cases just an acceptance of conventions from its player. (Same for eyes, noses and other proportions in anime.)

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.

The one where the fog is clinging to the V shaped hills instead of settling in the valley looks off to me.

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.

Beside those aspects, they are all overly dramatic with strong sunlight and shadows with iconic backdrops.

The tell I noticed, is when there seem to be 2 suns!

the mountains have a tendency to be surreally pointy

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