Macron as a garbage collector, Trump arrested: These images generated by artificial intelligence were circulating on the Internet. If there’s no tool that can spot them with certainty, recontextualizing the snapshot and identifying visual inconsistencies can help identify them, specialists told AFP.
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Midjourney, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion…: these programs are capable of generating an infinite number of recordings from a huge database constantly fed by user requests. Some, ultra-realistic and linked to the news, have caused confusion.
There is software to try to detect them, but their results are still very mixed, according to tests conducted by AFP.
“In general, when an AI generates an image in its entirety, it doesn’t take parts of a single photo. Thousands or even millions of photos are used to account for billions of parameters,” David Fischinger, an engineer at the Austrian Institute of Technology and a specialist in AI, told AFP.
“The AI (…) deconstructs them and then reconstructs a photo pixel by pixel”, hence the impotence of the usual recognition software, adds Vincent Terrasi, co-founder of Draft & Goal, a startup that launched a content detector generated by AI
But there are still tricks, the experts say.
The photos of Trump’s false arrest, thanks to reverse image search, allow the source to be traced: a tweet from Eliot Higgins, founder of investigative site Bellingcat, who says he created it via Midjourney.
Some software also leaves a visual signature: a multicolored bar in the right corner for DALL-E.
You can also compare the image with photos of the same event from reliable sources. For example, the fake shot of Putin kneeling before Xi Jinping has a very different backdrop to photos of the Chinese leader’s visit to the Kremlin.
Other details the AI can reveal, like “the grain of the image, which will be very different,” according to Tina Nikoukhah, PhD in image processing.
On the free versions of the AIs tested by AFP, some generated images had a style similar to the high-contrast hyper-realistic image genre.
“Certain features, often the same, cause problems for the AI, it’s these (visual) inconsistencies that need to be questioned,” notes Vincent Terrasi.
For example, the hands are often deformed. In a photo allegedly taken during an anti-pension reform demonstration of a CRS hugging a protester, we can see that the police officer has… six fingers.
“However, the AIs are getting better every day and have fewer and fewer anomalies, so we should not rely on long-term visual cues,” warns Annalisa Verdoliva, professor at the University Frédéric II in Naples.
“At the moment, AIs are also having a hard time generating reflections. A good option (…) is therefore to look for shadows, mirrors, water, but also to zoom in on the eyes,” emphasizes Vincent Terrasi, as in this photo of Emmanuel Macron before a demonstration, shared on Instagram: Her eyes are brown, not blue (the two eyes aren’t quite the same shade of brown either).
The generators also often create asymmetries: disproportionate face, ears at different heights… Teeth and hair are also difficult to imitate.
Finally, mixing multiple images can cause lighting issues, the experts point out.
Mistakes often lurk in the background. In very realistic images of Barack Obama and Angela Merkel on the beach that have been doing the rounds on social media, one of the characters in the background has his legs cut off.
“The further away an element is, the more an object becomes blurry, deformed and has incorrect perspectives,” confirms Vincent Terrasi.
In the fake Putin/Xi photo, the vertical line of a pillar is broken, several chairs are deformed, and Vladimir Putin’s head is disproportionately large.
In some fake photos of a muscular Trump arrest, the faces of several officers are out of focus, and police officers’ arms and legs appear here and there without consequence.
While some elements aren’t necessarily distorted, they can still reveal an error: for example, in a photo generated by AFP on Midjourney purported to show a street in Paris, we can see a sign not allowed…blue.