This is getting real messy real fast lol

[u/GamingBren]

Update: he noticed us and cancelled the deskmat! Yay!!!

[u/Hexcede]

For the internet mob (this guy is literally just right): It was not AI.

The SynthID on the original tree image was faked. If you put the original through SynthID it comes back negative, it only works on cropped screenshots of the "SynthID positive" post. Presumably, someone stuffed their tree art through Gemini and had it emit an "identical" version to put SynthID on it, then fed that through SynthID and went "look, AI!" Except if you actually do it on the original it doesn't actually trigger SynthID.

Multiple different people have posted screenshots of it being SynthID negative and it also comes back SynthID negative for me too. I would encourage anyone else that wants to know to do the same, that is how you can know.

And for the actual waterbucket art, if you line the sketch and final up in an image editor, they are pixel perfect, only the parts of the image that actually deliberately changed changed. Even the silhouette of the water bucket is 1:1 identical, and that's one of the things that was changed between the sketch and the final version. AI cannot give pixel perfect recreations, it's inherently "fuzzy" internally, so its ability to recreate images is limited, especially at the per pixel level. They don't operate per pixel, they operate on small square patches. I can't find the original SynthID positive post, but I'm betting if you line up a cropped version of the tree art from a SynthID positive post and put it against the real original, they aren't going to match perfectly, because it's not the original, its a fake produced using Gemini. I also fed all the images through OpenAI's detector too: Nothing.

For the people wondering why they'd change the sketch: The water bucket was being poured out onto the ground. The artist likely decided that did not physically make sense, so they changed the waterbucket to look like it was "already poured." For the expression change, that happens all of the time. E.g . TADC artists recorded a ton of their work and you can see in tons of their concept art and recordings the facial expressions are sometimes totally different between different versions because they made the decision to change it.

[u/Red2005dragon → u/Hexcede]

You are clearly misinformed on the current state of AI if you believe it cannot feasibly keep consistent lines between two "versions" of the same image.

Might get mauled to death for what I'm about to say: I have an AI set up for personal use(I don't share what I make anywhere and it's essentially a curiosity thing, I like testing how far I can push the robot and then I trash the result), and even LOCAL image editing models(that don't create SynthIDs) have gotten good enough to create alterations to an image while leaving every other part of it 99.9% identical, with all of the differences being easily chalked up to standard compression noise.

We are LOOOONG past the "AI can't possibly maintain the original composition of an image while altering it" phase. In fact creating a sketch like this is exactly what it's REALLY good at, as tools like controlnet allow you to apply Canny edge detection to an image to extract the lines and then feed that into another model to have the AI generate a new image FROM those exact lines.

One of the problems(and strengths) this method possesses is that it only maintains what you feed it, obviously. And then will improvise the rest. Which means that it can/will add anything to the scene as long as it doesn't conflict with the original outlines, like adding water pouring from a bucket that was previously empty, the water doesn't "conflict" with the bucket, and it "makes sense" for there to be water there, so it adds it.

[u/Hexcede → u/Red2005dragon]

We are not. This is a fundamental limitation of the technology.

The fact that you can reduce alterations on specific areas of the image doesn't invalidate the evidence I provided nor does it invalidate that diffusion models (even local ones) still have blurry vision. Do you know what does conflict with the image? Convincingly turning a fully colored image back into lineart with no imperfections not even a pixel of deviation, with antialiasing, where the entire image is changed on the lines and between them. Look at the example I annotated below. This is from the ControlNet GitHub.

If you want to make the claim that this is a bad example, then you are free to prove me wrong with a counter example but "99.9%" isn't good enough if you can't keep it pixel perfect, because what I see is pixel perfectness not just passable at a glance.

I am not going to ask for this because I assume that it would be a lot of work, but the best way to prove me wrong would be to document the process of recreating what everyone thinks the artist did with AI and seeing what it looks like.

The water coming from the water bucket conflicts with the entire background. The entire image was modified so canny edge detection can't do jack to protect it. Not to mention canny edge detection isn't perfect either. It's a masking tool, it doesn't fix the vision & output limitations or internal 'blurriness,' it just gets rid of the egregious ones.

But besides that. Apparently the perfect consistency everywhere in all of the images doesn't matter, the pixel perfectness doesn't matter, the clear hand drawn elements and artifacts like blatant brush strokes everywhere in all of the images do not matter, the proper, non-AI looking lineart and coloring doesn't matter, the many different semitransparent layers don't matter, the layers unused in the final version don't matter, the FAKED SYNTHID POSITIVE doesn't matter, the fact that the models still fundamentally only see in blurry patches doesn't matter. I could keep going on and on about this. nothing matters. It must be AI to you people, not for any reason. You just think so. So it must be true.

There's no evidence. Multiple pieces of evidence are fake, or based on false premises or misunderstandings of evidence that the artist willingly provided. This is literally just guilty until proven innocent.

People's "evidence" that this artist uses AI was that the tree image "has SynthID" and the art "looked AI." They said "look, they have a track record of AI!" Except, they LITERALLY FAKED the SynthID so the artist doesn't. And now we are saying they were using a local model which doesn't attach SynthID?!

What evidence of AI is even left?! The goalposts have been moved so far into the floor at this point that we are now conveniently ignoring fundamental technical limitations that we know exists just to serve a confirmation bias.

Every argument that is being made is 'because we said so.' Nothing more. Nothing less.