Comment on Useful things at the mall
Redjard@reddthat.com 1 week agoFirst, @nialv7@lemmy.world was roght, the background by itself without the box has a synthid, I commented some screenshots below.
I also see those “ai artifacts” on the barcode, though I wasn’t as sure about it before seeing the synthid.
I can make out that the lines don’t run quite parallel but form these V and Λ shapes, closer together on one end and merging together.
Counting the left most blurry line as one, the 5th is leaning into the 4th line at the top for example. The compression is strong and the image doesn’t have enough resolution to make it out very clearly, but it still looks like an actual detail not a compression artifact to me. The lines are all a bit wonky, more than the noise could do.
Here’s a way more obvious example:
Image
This has some other artifacts too that I don’t see in the post, but you can see the general wonkiness. And also how some lines have “bled” together, though this isn’t a great example of that.
DarthFreyr@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I saw the watermark stuff, and I’m not contesting any of that, my specific interest is in the fine-detail artifacts. The apparent leaning of some of the bars, eg the 5th and 6th, can 100% be explained by something like a smudge between them; I’d know because I actually drew up some parallel bars in paint.net, rotated and zoomed them, lightened a splotch, and gave it blur to match. Human eyes and brain are pretty good at picking out valid details from degraded images, but you have to remember we’re talking about the level of shading of a handful of pixels, it does not take much disturbance at all to create an illusion of non-parallel lines. A hard object hitting the tag there would be enough to damage the barcode printing slightly to create such a lightening as would produce the leaning appearance.
I’m not saying that an AI didn’t draw the barcode, and I’m not even saying that it doesn’t have an effect like that because of generative AI imperfections. I’m saying that nothing that I see, or that has been pointed out to me, about the appearance of the barcode provides any indication or suggestion that the image is AI-generated, instead of those being typical results of looking at an image that has been resized and compressed/converted as it travels across the internet. Or to say the quiet part out loud, that those who see “ai artifacts” in the barcode are chasing ghosts, regardless of the actual image creation or the presence of watermarks/fingerprinting.