Technology

It really depends on the image. Some AI generated images of people really seem indistinguishable from a photograph. Not all, but it's definitely going to become more common. At this point it seems like every month has a new breakthrough for some aspect AI regarding consistency and realism. As people work to bring stable diffusion video to a more reliable state the images themselves are only going to get better.

There's a number of models out there right now that don't have hand issues as much. There are other methods like using a pose to force hide the hands. We're getting to the point where we just need metadata viewers on every image because the eye alone isn't reliable for this. How many artists have already been accused of being "AI art like" and they were not.

Stopping it? I don't know if you can stop Pandora's box. Personally, I'm of the opinion that flooding AI images is the only way to "stop" it, simply by making people not care about it. At a certain point, you can only make so many variations of gollum as a playing card /ninja turtle/movie star before they get boring to the public. I also have doubts that the people using this are overall the type of people who would have paid artists for commissions, or that that would even stop a sale from happening in the first place (my partner makes mushroom forest scenes with Stable Diffusion but she also buys about $300 of art from our friends and local artists through the year). Like, Stable Diffusion doesn't make oil paintings.

Little Jimmy in his room or the 60 hour week worker? They pose no harm making these images and it makes them happy, so why take that away from them? And regarding the nefarious aspect of it - that one is much harder but it's in part societal shame as well. Explicit images made by AI may make the process easier, but if it's something nefarious the people will find a way to do it regardless. Video sex scams and catfish were around long before AI. I'm not certain that these will inherently become more prevalent as the tech becomes more accessible. It's the people posting them. Which to me comes down to more of a societal issue than a technological one.

However, in terms of trying to stop it maybe there could be a hash similar to the CASM that gets used here. Maybe the image uploader can look for metadata markers that come with generated images and deny those ones? That's an easy workaround though, since metadata can be stripped.

I dunno. I think we've gotta EEE AI. Embrace AI images by flooding society with their presence, Extend AI images by getting the ability to use it into the hands of everyone, and then Extinguish the power that generated images hold over people because fake pictures don't matter in the slightest.