Prompt: How can you tell something is AI-produced? Can you? Are there examples where you were fooled? What are the implications of your being fooled or not being fooled?

When I gaze upon an image that has been produced by AI, more often than not I can discern the origins of the image. I do not know how to articulate what elements of such images lead me to that conclusion; I recognize them when they are there. For lack of a better word, the pictures appear somewhat “artificial;” it’s as if the essence of an image is repackaged by AI as it generates countless images that all vary with one another. I also can’t discount my experience with AI, which has helped me analyze the qualities of an image that it produces.

There is also an element of perfection in images produced by AI. It’s not that natural images cannot be beautiful, symmetrical, crisp, and so forth, but the images that AI produces are consistently so. Human error pervades every aspect of our world; to take it away is to, in a sense, divorce humanity from images. I can’t recall when I was deceived into thinking that AI had not produced a picture when it did. However, Sora (a type of AI) will most likely deceive me at some point or another. I was introduced to it by a friend from church and awestruck by the realism therein. It is not perfect, but compared to the images that ChatGPT produces, it’s not remotely comparable. If virtual reality incorporates technology such as Sora, the line between reality and the virtual world will become more blurred. 

If I am not under the impression that an image is real, then I will regard it as “fake,” despite what my senses may tell me. When AI fails to fool me, it is a display of the limitations of AI to generate something that is “real,” which is discerned by our senses and intuition. However, if I do recognize the image is real, despite it not being so, a blend of fiction and reality is taking place in my mind. Our senses are the mechanisms by which we discern the real from the not-real. If AI progresses to a place where such discernment (via our senses) can no longer be consistently relied upon, we will not be able to determine whether something is real or not, apart from our intuition.