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Comment by hexmiles | Hacker News Reader

Is there an explanation for why AI images, or posters, look "AI"? What I mean is that even some of the better ones, that I quite like, have a distinct AI look that I can’t quite put my finger on.

Some elements are, the very saturated color or being overly busy, but not all images have these tells, and not all of them.

For a while I thought it was that sort of very subtle dithering/texture that a lot of the images have, but again not all of them.

Looking online, most seem to focus on things like the wrong number of fingers, things merging into one another, details that don't make sense, etc., but that’s not what I’m talking about.

Does anyone have an explanation for why they are this easy to recognize as AI even when they are decent?

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Just as with "you're absolutely right" and the em-dash thing, the image models have a load of habits they fall back on. Some of them are easy to spot - the yellow filter, making grids of icons, ...

Others are things you recognise subconsciously without being able to describe consciously. I've been experimenting a lot, and I can probably see more tells than most people. But sometimes it's just a sixth sense.

And some of those tells do now give me the ick. And some of those tells are in the "better" posters on that page. Today I would clean them off.

But I still think it's unnecessary and dishonest to try and hide that it's made by AI - just tidy up the bits that give people ick. Same goes for text, btw.

Hi, thanks.

Yes, I agree that disclosure is important, and yes, some of it is just “habits” of the model and we are a pattern-matching machine.

I still find it fascinating that, in my group of friends with somewhat diverse backgrounds, we are all pretty good at spotting AI-generated images (and also text to a lesser extent), but none of us can quite describe how. Some of the tells are more obvious, but I would love to see someone do a more systematic exploration of AI art to unearth the less common ones. Sometimes it almost makes me feel “crazy” that, to me, something is clearly AI, but I would not have any idea how to explain to someone who can’t recognize it how.

This is a bit of a problem for me when, for example, I try to explain to my parents how to spot it, and I can only show a list of AI images and say, “You know… like that,” instead of giving a real explanation.

A lot of things are like that though. There's a cartoon - I thought XKCD but I can't find it - about how a beginner might identify an oak leaf by a set of descriptions - but an experienced arboriculturist would just say "well, you know, it's an oaky shape".

Like, I can tell a crow from a blackbird. Could I explain to you how to tell a crow from a blackbird? Absolutely not.

They usually do a noticeably bad job at kerning and text in general. They’ve gotten much better but it still doesn’t quite match the results of actually using a font/computer-generated text.

They also tend to not lay things out in quite the pixel perfect way you’d expect from a good designer. But that’s not as good a tell because many designers also fuck this up.

I probably wouldn’t catch these good examples as AI in a casual context, but those tells would be enough to decide if I was asked.

To me, it seems more to be something about the colors, but other than saying that they are often oversaturated, I can't quite place exactly what it is. I sometimes try to open them with an image editor and zoom in, or use other tools to try to "discover" what it is that I'm seeing, but without success so far. It doesn't help that graphics is not something I have experience with.

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