My hot take. Apologies, but:
Why do people think they’re walking AI detectors, soley based on the art itself?
I find it pretentious.
To be clear, the who, where, and how a piece is published is important context. One should be suspicious of suspicious artists.
But not the what.
Don’t even look at the piece. Extreme cases aside, no one can definitively tell if art is AI generated just by looking at it.
This is by David Revoy, who has started getting wrongly accused of using AI for his art
To anyone who finds it necessary to “call out” stuff for being either fake or AI generated when there are no stakes, why are you like that? When you’re wrong, you’re at least as big of an asshole as anyone actually putting out AI generated art as if they made it. Probably more of an asshole because you’re specifically targeting an artist’s work while those posting AI art as if they made it aren’t trying to bring anyone down like you are.
Generating slop should be socially shunned, that’s the only way we survive this onslaught. Defending slopgen should be shunned as well.
I’m not trying to be dramatic or anything, but we’re in an existential battle for the survival of the concept of beauty here.It’s constant in game development. Every single indie game that comes out, there’s somebody screaming about AI.
Indie devs have become so paranoid that they have to document to show that it’s not AI. And that person yelling actually wasn’t even interested in the game. They just wanted to punch down.
Social backlash is the best way to discourage use and promote education.
Being wrong is bound to happen, but the burden of proof is on those presenting their work. Just because its annoying doesnt mean its not effective or necessary
This looks like AI.
Agrees to the first sentiment, BS on the second. Don’t accuse people of things unless you can prove it. Or at least provide more than your gut feeling because “you can tell from the pixels”.
It’s unfortunate, but this is the burden created by machine generated art. The damage it has created will last for generations at the least.
Some dude flippantly cake me ai on here a few months ago(because of typos ironically enough) and convinced someone else to block me. People suck.
Funnily enough, the image “painted” actually reminded me of some older art done by Matt Page… specifically:
https://www.deviantart.com/fallout161/art/R-E-B-I-R-T-H-37772948
A bit old but it immediately reminded me of it.
That and all proper English writing gets you accused of using ChatGPT, because ChatGPT was trained on proper English writing.
And the blog format.
I sometimes send emails with typos/grammar errors because I was sick of people saying this.
Like you know what? Fuck you. I’m turning my “affects” into “effects” and deleting a vowel.
I understand your logic but I hate it (and am trying not to hate you).
RESIST
It does rather make one suspect that a number of people haven’t read a great deal of properly-written English.
It’s also a snowball effect where they compete to escape the accusation of using ChatGPT or being “unc” or “boomer,” self-policing to ensure everyone writes like garbage.
I was once told “I write like someone who thinks they are good at writing.” That was met with rounds of applause by the people who can’t (or won’t) spell, capitalize, or punctuate anything.
To their credit, communication is a two-way street. If I’m writing such that nobody understands what I’m saying but me, it’s not “good writing.” But it does feel like we’re nose-diving towards Idiocracy and I’m not happy about it.
I was once told “I write like someone who thinks they are good at writing.” That was met with rounds of applause by the people who can’t (or won’t) spell, capitalize, or punctuate anything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome
Tall poppy syndrome is a term that originated in Australia and New Zealand in the 1980s that refers to people with notable public success or achievements that are ostracised by others as a form of egalitarianism.[1][2] Intense scrutiny and criticism of such a person is termed as “cutting down the tall poppy”.[3]
“That one sounds uppity!”
When i saw the character face i unironnically thought it was AI 😭
Luckly I just continue to look at the drawing for other clues and I am sure it’s legit
It’s how they train the AI unfortunately.
I saw a comic that was in the style of a web comic I followed in the early 2000s and it was AI generated. Its really frustrating.
Will anyone learn to be less vociferous with their AI accusations, or only be more vociferous with their dislike for AI and so to make more dubious accusations?
I saw a recent David Revoy comic that everyone here on Lemmy was accusing of being AI. Which is really tragic for someone who goes to such effort, is such a supporter of free software, and in my opinion has a style which is quite far from typical AI output.
Artist self insert, given Lemmy even accused them of being AI despite them documenting everything. That’s unfortunately the only way to validate at the moment, although if I’m being honest I kinda dig behind the scenes. It is especially interesting if you can see a beautiful photograph and all the work they put into getting the lighting just right.
Wait, is it inherently bad for an artist to self-insert? Isn’t that one of the key ways they share their perspective? If there’s some bizarre strawman-ing or self-aggrandizing going on it can problematic but the general idea of an artist self-inserting themselves or their ideas into their work seems fine to me.
I don’t know if the person you replied to implied it was a bad thing, but it’s been a thing for centuries, Caravaggio self inserted himself and people from the street in his paintings, van Eyck hid himself in his paintings, Louis David painted himself among the Coronation of Napoleon, etc
Yes, I didn’t mean to imply it’s a bad thing. Just that it simply is. Plenty of comic artists do that, and I wanted to give context.
Honestly this is one of the biggest issues with it all that you don’t really see talked about much
Artists sink a load of time into a piece of art they are proud of, and because AI has got to the point now it’s not always obvious at first glance to average Joe, so people rely on heuristics to spot it instead.
For this artist apparently it’s “yellows”
For anyone who takes photos (or even video now) even half seriously, photos with Bokeh and good lighting get called out now
You like making instrumental electronic or sampled music? Get ready for everything to be called AI
Even writing: I always used to like using em dashes—they’re a pretty versatile piece of punctuation for any casual speech style of writing. If you use an em dash now though, someone just assumes the text is AI. So I’ve generally just stopped; not because I want to, because AI and people (somewhat understandably) not having a better way to identify AI writing.
Hell, I made an excel sheet the other day to work some stuff out and someone asked how I got the AI to do it…
Now I’m not saying it’s everyone, but I’m seeing a group of people forming, who basically say anything they can’t immediately understand how to do themselves must be AI. I have a suspicion it’s the same demographic that would say “well I could do that” in a modern art museum or “all they do is press play” when looking at any kind of electronic music production.
uhh from my experience, any piece of art of sufficient quality will be accused of being AI made these days.
With photography it’s also a grey area. I’m a professional underwater photographer. I’ve got thousands of dollars of specialized housings, lighting, wet lenses, etc, but the color is still wrong because water. Meanwhile some open water student swam by 40 minutes ago and made the whole area hazy.
So for decades I’ve done various degrees of touch up and and color grading because what you see with your eyes looks nothing like what comes out of the camera because human eyes and brains do a lot of processing that camera sensors don’t.
And then there’s generative stuff that I don’t think impact the art of photography. If someone uses generative noise reduction I don’t think that’s a problem. The non-generative solution to that is spending an extra 10 grand on a better camera and lens, so it’s not as much of a skill issue as a money one. I’m absolutely fine with people using generative tools for that stuff.
So where’s the border between acceptable and unacceptable post-processing? There’s clearly bad stuff like wholesale fakes and such, but I don’t know if we have a clear line.
Smartphone cameras are almost certainly the largest source of photography in society today, and those things default to doing all kinds of automatic processing on the images they take.
I agree.
To many times I have to post this meme because someone yet again thinks everything they see is AI. Even if the original picture is like 10 years old. Especially apparent in the “Fuck AI” community.

I’m currently writing a book and I’m terrified of using EM dashes, even where they would be perfectly applicable. I always end up restructuring the sentences to avoid it. The only instance i keep it is for dialogoue interruptions like:
“I bend over and spread my—”
People who read books are a different breed. I wouldn’t worry about them.
But if we’re going to make a lazy heuristical stand against AI, I’ve always enjoyed the liberal use of semi-colons.
Just use them regardless. A lot of sloppers realized they can ask the slop making machines to leave them out. I even seen stuff when they added random typos to fool some people.
“—cheeks.”
If it gives you any consolation, I’m also a fan of em dashes and don’t assume LLM output when seeing them. But there are other telltale signs of LLM writing. At least when the LLM is not instructed to hide those maybe?
The “default” LLM style is so grating to me, in a condescending corpospeak kind of way.
You’re absolutely right! Let’s see if we can find better ways to determine if something is AI-generated:
- what other styles are giveaways?
- maybe a combination of em dashes and bulleted lists?
- I’m running out of ideas for this joke.
One thing that always makes me think something is AI written is the repeated use of sentences like “It’s not X, its Y”.
Circling back to the point of this post though, genAI learnt that from real people’s writing first.
And if they are training for it at all, genAI will eventually get better at not being seen as AI than real people.
I use that so much I just assumed AI got it from me
AI writes like a hybrid of an opinion article journalist and a know-it-all redditor.
It’s very common on journalism.
I think what makes the em dash seem AI-like is… there isnt an em dash button on the keyboard.
So typically the only way those show up is when markdown-to-blog-post tools convert normal dashes into stylized em dashes as a transpiling process.
Stuff like hugo and etc largely do this automatically.
So if a poster uses an em dash out of that context, it right away throws up a red flag cuz… howd you do that easily?
Did you memorize the alt code to make one?
I use a the Compose key (Compose hyphen hyphen hyphen) or emacs (C-x 8 _ m) on Linux, and on Android, my soft keyboard supports holding hyphen to insert one.
And the Lemmy Web UI converts a triple hyphen to an em-dash.
It depends on the keyboard, and the software. I’m using HeliBoard on my phone right now, and all I have to do to make an em dash is hold the dash key—that’s it. It’s actually quite trivial to add em dashes in various cases, and I wish folks wouldn’t pretend otherwise.
I also make use of other characters, like my beloved interrobang. I actually have that pinned to my clipboard, so I can paste it when it’s appropriate.
“You care about writing enough to use special characters‽”
“Yes.”
Did you memorize the alt code to make one?
Fun fact: on some keyboard layouts you can access the em dash easly
This is the most common Italian layout

You can see that you just need to press control+hyphen
The marking above the hyphen there is an underscore — it’s telling you that hitting shift-hyphen will give you an underscore.
You may be using software that supports inserting an em-dash when you hit that combination, but I don’t believe that it’s the keyboard layout that dictates that.
searches
It sounds like Microsoft Word does something similar:
Use Ctrl with keyboard shortcuts to insert an em or en dash
To insert an em dash, click where you want to insert the em dash and then press Ctrl + Alt + – (minus sign on the numeric keypad).
To insert an en dash, click where you want to insert the en dash and then press Ctrl + – (minus sign on the numeric keypad).
let me – try something
yep, lemmy can do it.
Weird — I just see a double dash
The Lemmy Web UI converts a double hyphen to an en-dash and a triple to an em-dash when displaying text. However, not all clients do this. I’m viewing this in Infinity, and it leaves the hyphens intact.
This conversion happens when viewing the comment, rather than writing it.
i gotta be honest, before it became a big talking point with AI, i didn’t realize em dashes, en dashes, and dashes were different characters, just different grammatical functions of the same character. i figured fancy word processors made them longer to make them distinct from minus signs, but that was it!
If you go through Unicode, there are a bunch of hyphen-like characters. In many typefaces, some may appear identical.
searches

EDIT: That’s not an exhaustive list, either. Off-the-cuff, I can also think of the line-drawing characters, which also have a horizontal line.
I’ll be honest, I was this moment-old when I released that too, thanks to reading this comment. I, also, assumed they were just different stylisations of the same thing.
Did you memorize the alt code to make one?
If you use the compose key, you don’t have to memorize the unicode value. You just press
compose ---.if you use lemmy, type
a -- bto get “a – b”.With that you made an en-dash, not an em-dash.
Let’s see if it does anything if you use three a — b vs two a – b ?
Edit: Yep looks like that’s it.
So if a poster uses an em dash out of that context, it right away throws up a red flag cuz… howd you do that easily?
Did you memorize the alt code to make one?
On KDE, the default keyboard layout makes it pretty easy to type the various dashes and quotation marks, so that’s one way. Ever since discovering that, I’ve been making a conscious effort to use them (because I am the type of person who likes doing the typograhically correct thing, even in an informal context… maybe that’s the problem, actually). Haven’t been called out as “AI” yet, but it’s probably going to happen at some point.
Same on GNOME, em-dash is RightAlt-- on my layout
It’s one click away on my android keyboard.
Mac has always been opt+shift+hyphen
Honestly for old versions of windows yes, you had to learn the arcane alt+0151, but I was already used to that for typing in french on a British keyboard. It’s now more like Mac with win+shift+hyphen
Android and IPhone, you just hold on the hyphen to get to them
And many word processors (and Linux via compose) turn a triple hyphen into one
On a Mac it’s shift + option + dash. Just option + dash for an en dash.
The em dash is just one of the signs that usually (if you use more rhan 1 braincell) does not in itself signal AI. For me at least I need more than just them to identify something as AI, it’s the way they phrase stuff and use typical AI sentence structures.
This was the discussion on a recent post, which seems to be deleted now, about “AI” art on beer cans in the Mildly Infuriating community.
It’s really upsetting how much art is now seen as AI looking when AI art only looks that way cause it was trained on great art. Anything stylized, slightly sepia, realistically shaded, etc etc, automatically assumed to be AI when some people have trained decades to develop this style themselves, but now it’s just slop style
Some sloppers now ask the bots to draw them stick men figures, because drawing them by hand is like 10 millennium old technology, and it needs to be replaced ASAP.
This artist has it rough in particular.
It happened to me,
it will occur to you🫵tooAI is like that unwanted child, trying to belong.
i think this is more a problem with the digital art. AI hasnt sprung arms nor a wallet to go out and buy the crazy expensive art supplies yet required to put blobs on the canvas.
1993

Current AI doesn’t have enough Data.
fine for those who have themselves a data.
Give it a few years, and some very hateful AI bro will build a CNC machine that prints JPEGs using oil paint.
You can write or draw stuff with a fountain pen with an AxiDraw, and that’s an off-the-shelf system. I imagine that it could paint as well.
CNC machine that prints
I think printers are just CNC machines that print.
ok go ahead and outrage on a whatif then. suit yourself. meanwhile the digital world is the thing that is burning right now.
Found the hateful AI bro!
There are people getting paid to train AI with their manual skills right now.
And of course they’re exploited workers in “third world” countries where poverty may be life-threatening (not talking about the US this time), so nobody can realistically fight back.
Capitalism is a bitch.
I tried to get my boomer mom into this. I sent her something tame!




















