Just saw proof that AI art detection tools are basically guessing

I was always on the side of "AI art is fine, who cares how it's made." Then I read this study from Stanford last week where they tested 5 popular AI detectors on 1000 real images. The best one only got 62% right. That means nearly 4 out of 10 times it would flag a human-made drawing or photograph as AI generated. That's just nonsense for something people are using to accuse artists or creators. Has anyone else seen how these tools fail on simple black and white sketches?

3 comments

3 Comments

jordanc328d ago

the best one only got 62% right" yeah that honestly tracks with what I've seen messing around with Midjourney outputs vs my own ink drawings. I literally took a charcoal sketch I did last month and ran it through three of those detector sites for a laugh. Two of them said 90% chance AI generated. One said 78% human. Complete coin flip. It's wild to me that people are using these to call out artists on twitter or reddit like they're some kinda truth machine. I've even seen a case where a photographer got accused because their image had smooth gradients and clean edges. The whole thing feels like a scam honestly, just preying on people's fear of AI while doing nothing useful.

hugoh557d ago

Reminds me of that time my buddy tried to use one of those dog breed apps on his rescue mutt. App said it was half husky half lab. Vet said nope, that's a pitbull mix with something else. These things just guess and call it a day.

chen.casey5d ago

Read that same Stanford study. The part that got me was how much worse they got on grayscale images versus color ones. Something about the lack of color noise patterns threw them off completely. A simple pencil sketch had a higher false positive rate than a full color digital painting.