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I scored 27/30, with around 12 being human-created. I've been keeping a close eye on DALL-E 2, especially images posted on Twitter and Reddit[0], and the bigge

I scored 27/30, with around 12 being human-created. I've been keeping a close eye on DALL-E 2, especially images posted on Twitter and Reddit[0], and the biggest sign that it's a DALL-E 2 image to me are the edges of objects not being as crisp as you'd expect in a human-created image. The composition that DALL-E 2 creates is typically fantastic, but it isn't perfect when it comes to the edges, details, and textures (fabric, for example). I still think it's incredible for inspiration — I don't think a typical artist/designer will use DALL-E 2's output as the final image, but rather as a great starting/mid point for their final image. I can see myself using DALL-E 2 to generate something akin to a wireframe that I'll then go in and add the details to manually. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/

notahacker 4y ago
Biggest signs for me were the edges you mentioned, compositions that werent technically bad but were visually uninteresting (and had minor logical flaws like missing details in a reflection), but also the subject matter is the sort of thing that could be described in a succint text prompt designed to challenge a machine (I actually guessed a couple of the prompts, and "tessellated Hello Kitty" and "Origami car" are less likely to be human art concepts than challenges for machines). I'm browsing on a phone so some of the fine detail is lost. The fact that I'm using the subject matter as much as the image itself to discern AI art is a sign of how good the tech is though. Especially since the subject matter in question is typically "stuff that would be really challenging for an AI to conceptualise" and the image itself (not necessarily the AI's only attempt of course) is a sound attempt at rendering it. I see most of the utility as the opposite: the artist still needs to come up with the original concept, the overall compositions are unlikely to be better than an artist would conceive, but even in the hands of a non-artist a bit of text can produce "good enough" images (that can be cropped or touched up to remove rough edges) instantaneously which would take a lot of time for a skilled artist to produce.
- linux2647 4y ago
  > are less likely to be human art concepts than challenges for machines Counter-example: there was one image I got that was a Gameboy as a concrete brick. That seems like a prompt you’d give DALL-E 2, but it was actually of human creation
  - cowtools 4y ago
    Yeah, but I guessed that one correctly because that sort of art (taking symbolism like a game-boy and putting it in a "cool" medium) is pretty common on the internet already. It makes sense that someone would think to make that because a gameboy is basically already a grey brick. So it's really just a change of texture- it's a comparison of two things that look similar that a person would probably make but an AI might not. it has some artistic intent. The other DALL-E prompts are just "a <random subject> doing <random thing> in <random medium>", like "a dog building a fence in watercolor". Would it make sense for a person to paint a dog building a fence in watercolor? Probably not unless they're writing a children's book.
probably_wrong 4y ago
I made it "honestly" until photo 18 (where I got a score of 17/18), then I realized that all photos were auto-generated and spammed the "robot" button. Apparently there was a single human-generated picture in my set. > The composition that DALL-E 2 creates is typically fantastic, but it isn't perfect when it comes to the edges, details, and textures (fabric, for example). For me the trick for discerning them is asking "what's the purpose of this detail?", namely: if a figure is writing, what are they writing? If a figure is wearing a shirt, does it look like a shirt I've ever seen? Why are they standing the way they are standing? And what material is this statue made of?
jorgesborges 4y ago
There's me trying to evaluate intent, context, talent -- when instead I should look for blurry edges. I imagine a future when AI is so sophisticated and human-like they're granted all the privileges of living, sentient beings but they're still clumsy with a knife and fork and they fart too often in public.
sandworm101 4y ago
Biggest/best tell for me is not the image but the subject matter. The images with some interesting twist always come from the humans. For instance one image shown to me had human hands at a laptop, but they were coming through the screen to type. That is playing with human perception, twisting reality to make an artistic point (the self-typing laptop where the user comes from inside the machine). I've never seen an AI-generated image that projects any artistic depth. They are beautiful and sometimes funny, but never interesting. Of course most human-created images are equally shallow, but if you do see depth then you know it came from a human. Put this test to an art historian/appraiser or architect and they would probably score very well.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  This was my "tell" as well. I don't know a ton about DALL-E, but it seems like most of the pictures are in the style of "show X doing Y in the style of Z": "Show a bear carrying a pizza in a realistic style". The composition of the DALL-E ones is almost "random association", e.g. acid-trip type associations. For each image I'd ask myself "What purpose would a human have for creating this?" and it usually helped get me the right answer.
  - sandworm101 4y ago
    But what if the human is tasked with creating an image that looks like it was created by a machine? If you gave human artists the same taskings (X and Y in style of Z) then they would also create a bunch of purposeless images. That is the dataset I would create if I wanted to promote my AI project.
    - cowtools 4y ago
      I think that a human's portrayal would sometimes still be noticeably different. For example, if you prompted a human and DALL-E to draw "a fork in an electrical outlet", the human would probably portray the fork as shocking and exploding, whereas DALL-E would probably just portray a fork being put into an electrical outlet and nothing happening. Maybe that's a bad example because there may be enough depictions of forks in electrical outlets for DALL-E to learn to depict them as exploding, but my point is that DALL-E can't reason generally about the composition of the image.
rvieira 4y ago
Yeah, I used edges as a tell. For instance, the train at dusk on a bridge was really well composed overall, but some of the bridge cables were slightly transparent.

notahacker 4y ago

Biggest signs for me were the edges you mentioned, compositions that werent technically bad but were visually uninteresting (and had minor logical flaws like missing details in a reflection), but also the subject matter is the sort of thing that could be described in a succint text prompt designed to challenge a machine (I actually guessed a couple of the prompts, and "tessellated Hello Kitty" and "Origami car" are less likely to be human art concepts than challenges for machines). I'm browsing on a phone so some of the fine detail is lost. The fact that I'm using the subject matter as much as the image itself to discern AI art is a sign of how good the tech is though. Especially since the subject matter in question is typically "stuff that would be really challenging for an AI to conceptualise" and the image itself (not necessarily the AI's only attempt of course) is a sound attempt at rendering it. I see most of the utility as the opposite: the artist still needs to come up with the original concept, the overall compositions are unlikely to be better than an artist would conceive, but even in the hands of a non-artist a bit of text can produce "good enough" images (that can be cropped or touched up to remove rough edges) instantaneously which would take a lot of time for a skilled artist to produce.

linux2647 4y ago
> are less likely to be human art concepts than challenges for machines Counter-example: there was one image I got that was a Gameboy as a concrete brick. That seems like a prompt you’d give DALL-E 2, but it was actually of human creation
- cowtools 4y ago
  Yeah, but I guessed that one correctly because that sort of art (taking symbolism like a game-boy and putting it in a "cool" medium) is pretty common on the internet already. It makes sense that someone would think to make that because a gameboy is basically already a grey brick. So it's really just a change of texture- it's a comparison of two things that look similar that a person would probably make but an AI might not. it has some artistic intent. The other DALL-E prompts are just "a <random subject> doing <random thing> in <random medium>", like "a dog building a fence in watercolor". Would it make sense for a person to paint a dog building a fence in watercolor? Probably not unless they're writing a children's book.

probably_wrong 4y ago

I made it "honestly" until photo 18 (where I got a score of 17/18), then I realized that all photos were auto-generated and spammed the "robot" button. Apparently there was a single human-generated picture in my set. > The composition that DALL-E 2 creates is typically fantastic, but it isn't perfect when it comes to the edges, details, and textures (fabric, for example). For me the trick for discerning them is asking "what's the purpose of this detail?", namely: if a figure is writing, what are they writing? If a figure is wearing a shirt, does it look like a shirt I've ever seen? Why are they standing the way they are standing? And what material is this statue made of?

jorgesborges 4y ago

There's me trying to evaluate intent, context, talent -- when instead I should look for blurry edges. I imagine a future when AI is so sophisticated and human-like they're granted all the privileges of living, sentient beings but they're still clumsy with a knife and fork and they fart too often in public.

sandworm101 4y ago

Biggest/best tell for me is not the image but the subject matter. The images with some interesting twist always come from the humans. For instance one image shown to me had human hands at a laptop, but they were coming through the screen to type. That is playing with human perception, twisting reality to make an artistic point (the self-typing laptop where the user comes from inside the machine). I've never seen an AI-generated image that projects any artistic depth. They are beautiful and sometimes funny, but never interesting. Of course most human-created images are equally shallow, but if you do see depth then you know it came from a human. Put this test to an art historian/appraiser or architect and they would probably score very well.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
This was my "tell" as well. I don't know a ton about DALL-E, but it seems like most of the pictures are in the style of "show X doing Y in the style of Z": "Show a bear carrying a pizza in a realistic style". The composition of the DALL-E ones is almost "random association", e.g. acid-trip type associations. For each image I'd ask myself "What purpose would a human have for creating this?" and it usually helped get me the right answer.
- sandworm101 4y ago
  But what if the human is tasked with creating an image that looks like it was created by a machine? If you gave human artists the same taskings (X and Y in style of Z) then they would also create a bunch of purposeless images. That is the dataset I would create if I wanted to promote my AI project.
  - cowtools 4y ago
    I think that a human's portrayal would sometimes still be noticeably different. For example, if you prompted a human and DALL-E to draw "a fork in an electrical outlet", the human would probably portray the fork as shocking and exploding, whereas DALL-E would probably just portray a fork being put into an electrical outlet and nothing happening. Maybe that's a bad example because there may be enough depictions of forks in electrical outlets for DALL-E to learn to depict them as exploding, but my point is that DALL-E can't reason generally about the composition of the image.

rvieira 4y ago

Yeah, I used edges as a tell. For instance, the train at dusk on a bridge was really well composed overall, but some of the bridge cables were slightly transparent.