this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2025
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Honestly, for a community (lemmy) that wanted to get away from corporate stuff (reddit) it pains me to see how even the most basic thing to draw is being delegated to Ai (corporations).
I've come to the conclusion in the last couple weeks I simply can't identify AI images anymore. I have no clue what about this makes everyone call it out as AI, and there's have been many such instances of this happening with me lately. I'm going to get modern day Nigerian princed when I'm older I can feel it in my bones
The reason this one is blatant AI is that the imagery doesn’t make any sense. Why is the glass of water itself the optimist?
I fed it into ChatGPT, highlighted the errors, and told it what I wanted to be different.
Still looks kinda soulless.
I asked AI to add soul, but it said it was a thing weak, insecure people believe in when they can't accept the inevitiblity of their death and the meaninglessness of their lives.
Fun conversations you must be having with your instance.
I had fun trying my best to get it to admit (or just claim) to having deleted itself/experienced the present moment/developed internal motivations, etc.
This might seem like an odd thing to say, but it seems too well-made for stick figure art. It's too perfect, but for seemingly no reason. It's got no verve, no life to it, but its lines are so perfect that it's weird it doesn't have those things, you know? Someone with this degree of skill wouldn't make something this boring to look at unless it was part of the joke, but I don't think it is?
It's very strange.
The only person I can imagine drawing this manually is, like, an office worker who has this idea for a joke but who also doesn't really know what memes are on the Internet—like when someone misuses the success baby or something.
Excuse me. Who are you to talk down to a glass of water like that. Can't you just mind your own business and let the glass be optimistic.
Most of it for me is the font. It seems like chatgpt likes to use the same font for everything
It also kind of feels off somehow. I can't explain. it, but there's just something wrong with this image
I mean.. for me it’s the “why the fuck is the glass talking?”
Left guy has 1 arm. Both guys have an arm that melds into the surface that the glass is sitting on. The "optimist" is the glass.
Perspective.
Nah the arms are in front of the railing.
So what it's visually balanced. I would shy away from reading surrealist meaning into it but it's not like humans never make that kind of choice.
The plain fact of the matter is that nowadays it's often simply impossible to tell, and the people who say "they can always tell" probably never even tried to draw hands or they could distinguish twelve-fingered monstrosities from an artist breaking their pencil in frustration and keeping the resulting line because it's closer to passing than anything they ever drew before.
I agree that the "arm things" are wrong, as it's pretty clearly just an 'artistic choice' that a human could very much do.
But that said these images are 100% provable to be AI. If you haven't built up the intuition that immediately tells you it's AI (it's fair, most people don't have unlimited time for looking at AI images), these still have the trademark "subtle texture in flat colors" that basically never shows up in human-made digital art. The blacks aren't actually perfectly black, but have random noise, and the background color isn't perfectly uniform, but has random noise.
This is not visible to the human eye but it can be detected with tools, and it's an artifact caused by how (I believe diffusion) models work
Not using plain RGB black and white isn't a new thing, neither is randomising. Digital artists might rather go with a uniform watercolour-like background to generate some framing instead of an actual full background but, meh. It's not a smoking gun by far.
The one argument that does make me think this is AI was someone saying "Yeah the new ChatGPT tends to use that exact colour combination and font". Could still be a human artist imitating ChatGPT but preponderance of evidence.
I can generally spot SD and SDXL generations but on the flipside I know what I'd need to do to obscure the fact that they were used. The main issue with the bulk AI generations I see floating around isn't that they're AI generated, it's that they were generated by people with not even a hint of an artistic eye. Or vision.
But that doesn't really matter in this case as this work isn't about lines on screen, those are just a mechanism to convey a joke about Excel. Could have worked in textual format, the artistry likes with the idea, not in the drawing, or imitation thereof.
The thing missing here is that usually when you do texture, you want to make it visible. The AI 'watercolor' is usually extremely subtle, only affecting the 1-2 least significant bits of the color, to the point even with a massive contrast increase it's hard to notice, and usually it varies pixel by pixel like I guess "white noise" instead of on a larger scale like you'd expect from watercolor
(it also affects the black lines, which starts being really odd)
I guess it isn't really a 100% proof, but it's at least 99% as I can't find a presumed-human made comic that has it, yet every single "looks like AI" comic seems to have it
Same here. I did not think twice about this picture or a few other posts in the past and yet there are pitchforks in the comments and I think to myself "What are you all on about?". I rue how unrecognizable AI "slop" has gotten.
A year ago ai couldn't even make any sort of recognisable text, now it can do it flawlessly
But, not all AI is corporate run, there's plenty of AI models to choose from that are open source including image generation models
And actually, image generation models are much easier to run on "affordable" consumer hardware than LLMs
If they don't have the training data available, then I wouldn't consider them open source.
Well, technicaly you have training data available - the whole internet
Which model did you use to generate this, and what tool did you use?
Sorry for the misunderstanding, this was a crosspost, I didn't generate it. But image searching shows a few matches elsewhere, so I doubt who I crossposted it from generated it either
I hate this take. Not everyone can afford to pay for art or have the ability to draw.People need to get off AI's back and instead of complaining, figure out how to deal with it. Because it's not going anywhere.
You are aware that even if you make stickmans, people will appreciate it if the meme is good, right?
Don’t talk about ability to draw as though it’s some sort of elitist trait denied to the working class. People who can draw can do so because they put the hours in.
If you can’t be bothered putting the effort in when expressing yourself, why the hell should anyone else be interested in what you have to say?
I don't have enough time to learn I have to work to try and live the bleak few hours of life I get to myself a week. honestly with AI our bosses expect more it's slowing down
You have my sympathies, but that still doesn't mean you get to post complete nonsensical garbage where a glass of water is talking for no reason, that took you less effort to create than it did to read, and expect people to not tell you to jog on, when there's a whole wealth of creative artists out there who are putting in the energy but getting their space flooded with slop.
The web has objectively become much, much worse in the past 12 months because quality is getting drowned out by quantity.
How dare Dali paint pictures with melting clocks! If the clocks really were hot enough to melt, they would set the tree they're melting on ablaze!!!!11
I get it. Artists are afraid of their income. But with those kinds of takes, "AI bad because surrealism" I can't take you seriously as an artist so I guess nothing would be lost.
Surrealism is not nonsense. It has a purpose, even if that purpose is hard to tell. If you think Dali and AI slop is the same, you don't understand either.
Fine. If it's offending your senses too much to be tame surrealism, call it dada. If you think that replacing a person with an object cannot be an artistic choice, you... well, haven't seen much art.
Note that I'm not arguing for or against AI here. I'm saying that your critique of AI is slop.
Literally nobody is saying or thinking that. What we are saying is that there is absolutely no way that OP's prompt contained "...and make the optimist BE the glass itself...".
The irony is that you're giving OP way more benefit of the doubt in your reading of what they produced than you've given me, and instead argued against a complete strawman.
So what? It's still a choice to keep this result, and not another. Artists capitalise on chance occurrence all the time.
OP is not here to defend themselves. They're also not digging themselves further into a hole.
It's not dada. It's too coherent to be dada, and it's too shit to be anything else.
In order for something to be an artistic choice, it has to be a choice. It has to have meaning and intent. AI did not choose to put a glass there, it calculated that there was probably a glass there based on shitty reasoning. AI does not have the creative capacity to make art. It can only make images, and those images are shit.
You've thoroughly proven you can't tell between slop and high art, so thank you for the compliment of my critique.
Because the idea behind it is good? You're confusing art and craft. Why should anyone be interested in a urinal on a pedestal? The work is defined not by whether or not you can buy its physical representation in any random hardware store, I thought we had that one figured out.
Also there's literally zero people who would pay someone a commission to draw this piece. You're not looking at lost work you're looking at additional art. Without AI (if it is AI) it might have still existed but in stick figure form and that would be better because...? The idea has better expression as a chicken scratch? I don't think so.
It is incredible how jealous AI-hornies are of the toilet.
The toilet isn't the interesting thing, the interesting thing is how there's now authorised replicas in museums (the original is lost) signifying the discussion around art perception, not the art itself. Looking at one doesn't give you more insight than reading "and he put a urinal on a pedestal" in a textbook. It's a fucking urinal. The piece having no meaning onto itself was part of the point, it's all in the context. Yet, somehow, the replicas are authorised. A true rebel museum would forego getting an authorised one and buy a random one off the shelf, then proclaim it to be original.
You can't go into a room carrying a plucked chicken, proclaiming "behold, a human!" without there being Aristotelians around. Well you can but noone would talk about it millennia later.
I'm pretty sure anyone can draw stick figures.
A lot of bad things are "not going anywhere". We can still try to have less of them.
You'd be surprised.
AI is like a housefire. Nobody wants it. Nobody needs it. It's just a bad thing, and if someone sees it, they're more than justified in being upset and trying to get rid of it. Don't defend the fire, or you'll be the first to burn.
How do you know this is AI ?
Because the glass is the one saying "the glass is half full"
Left person also missing an arm. The shapes seem too perfect, like too circular, distance between them too. Their arms also ho into the line, which is a table?
It's all just so odd.
Not all AI is from corporates