The images of the Pope Francisco dancing, wearing a coat or wearing sunglasses have flooded the internet in recent weeks. They are all products of Artificial intelligence, but more than one thought they were real photos.
With each passing day, the greater the advances in technology, the the more difficult it is for people to differentiate a real image from a false one. Falling into this type of dilemma is easy, whether you are someone completely detached from the subject or very close to it.
Let’s remember how Artificial Intelligence programs such as Midjourney, DALL-E either Stable Diffusion: the user enters keywords, textual descriptions of what they need, and the AI generates the images.
Eliot Higgins, co-founder of Bellingcat, spoke to Wired about it. Higgins had released on Twitter images of the Former President Donald Trump Arrested By Police, at a time when his capture was rumored for the scandal of payments to the porn actress Stormy Daniels.
Although the expert always explained that they were images created by AI, more than one person thought that everything had really happened.
Making the differentiation, a complicated job sometimes
How do you differentiate real images from fake ones? According to Higgins, the first is to look outside the focal point.
“It’s obvious that he often focuses on the first object described (but) everything around him is often more flawed,” notes Bellingcat’s father.
The errors in the details are more common than you think: hands that are not noticeable, even three arms, objects that do not belong to the protagonist of the image… Nonsense texts are also found on badges, caps or t-shirts.
More: “I’ve noticed that if you ask for expressions, Midjourney tends to overplay them, with very pronounced wrinkles on the skin”, Higgins points out.
The expert also points out that it is easier to get better images of celebrities than unknown people in search engines. “The more famous a person is, the more images Artificial Intelligence has had to learn,” says Higgins.
“The less famous people They tend to look a little crooked.”
Real image against a false one produced by Artificial Intelligence
We leave you an example, produced in Samson Vowles YouTube channel, of real vs. fake photos produced by Artificial Intelligence.
And here another from Xataka’s friends. They compare real photos with fakes, testing the user’s eye to determine which is true and which is not. Sometimes it is difficult to differentiate them; others, no.
Solution: the real images are 1, 3, 6, 7 and 9; the others are generated by Artificial Intelligence.