Previous posts: https://programming.dev/post/3974121 and https://programming.dev/post/3974080
Original survey link: https://forms.gle/7Bu3Tyi5fufmY8Vc8
Thanks for all the answers, here are the results for the survey in case you were wondering how you did!
Edit: People working in CS or a related field have a 9.59 avg score while the people that aren’t have a 9.61 avg.
People that have used AI image generators before got a 9.70 avg, while people that haven’t have a 9.39 avg score.
Edit 2: The data has slightly changed! Over 1,000 people have submitted results since posting this image, check the dataset to see live results. Be aware that many people saw the image and comments before submitting, so they’ve gotten spoiled on some results, which may be leading to a higher average recently: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MkuZG2MiGj-77PGkuCAM3Btb1_Lb4TFEx8tTZKiOoYI
One thing I’m not sure if it skews anything, but technically ai images are curated more than anything, you take a few prompts, throw it into a black box and spit out a couple, refine, throw it back in, and repeat. So I don’t know if its fair to say people are getting fooled by ai generated images rather than ai curated, which I feel like is an important distinction, these images were chosen because they look realistic
Well, it does say “AI Generated”, which is what they are.
All of the images in the survey were either generated by AI and then curated by humans, or they were generated by humans and then curated by humans.
I imagine that you could also train an AI to select which images to present to a group of test subjects. Then, you could do a survey that has AI generated images that were curated by an AI, and compare them to human generated images that were curated by an AI.
Unless they explained that to the participants, it defeats the point of the question.
When you ask if it’s “artist or AI”, you’re implying there was no artist input in the latter.
The question should have been “Did the artist use generative AI tools in this work or did they not”?
Every “AI generated” image you see online is curated like that. Yet none of them are called “artist using generative AI tools”.
But they were generated by AI. It’s a fair definition
I mean fair, I just think that kind of thing stretches the definition of “fooling people”
LLMs are never divorced from human interaction or curation. They are trained by people from the start, so personal curation seems like a weird caveat to get hung up on with this study. The AI is simply a tool that is being used by people to fool people.
To take it to another level on the artistic spectrum, you could get a talented artist to make pencil drawings to mimic oil paintings, then mix them in with actual oil paintings. Now ask a bunch of people which ones are the real oil paintings and record the results. The human interaction is what made the pencil look like an oil painting, but that doesn’t change the fact that the pencil generated drawings could fool people into thinking they were an oil painting.
AIs like the ones used in this study are artistic tools that require very little actual artistic talent to utilize, but just like any other artistic tool, they fundamentally need human interaction to operate.
But not all AI generated images can fool people the way this post suggests. In essence this study then has a huge selection bias, which just makes it unfit for drawing any kind of conclusion.
This is true. This is not a study, as I see it, it is just for fun.
Technically you’re right but the thing about AI image generators is that they make it really easy to mass-produce results. Each one I used in the survey took me only a few minutes, if that. Some images like the cat ones came out great in the first try. If someone wants to curate AI images, it takes little effort.
I think if you consider how people will use it in real life, where they would generate a bunch of images and then choose the one that looks best, this is a fair comparison. That being said, one advantage of this kind of survey is that it involves a lot of random, one-off images. Trying to create an entire gallery of images with a consistent style and no mistakes, or trying to generate something that follows a design spec is going to be much harder than generating a bunch of random images and asking whether or not they’re AI.
I think getting a good image from the AI generators is akin to people putting in effort and refining their art rather than putting a bunch of shapes on the page and calling it done