Police investigation remains open. The photo of one of the minors included a fly; that is the logo of Clothoff, the application that is presumably being used to create the images, which promotes its services with the slogan: “Undress anybody with our free service!”
That hasn’t been the case for a while. With current models there is basically nothing that gives them instantly away as AI. You have to go anomaly hunting in the hopes to find an extra finger or a bit of text that looks twisted, but that assumes you already expect AI to begin with.
The best tell tale sign left for AI is really just the composition. It’s always very focused on the subject right in front of the camera, as if the person was posing for the photo, it’s never just random slice of life snapshot where you have multiple people in the image interacting in any kind of complex way. The crux of course is that your average Instagram image looks not much different, so it’s not exactly bullet proof either.
In the lab it’s still possible to tell the difference, if you run across an image in the wild you’ll just accept it as real without giving it a second though.
That should terrify everyone
And I believe that is the reason why these AI images look like this: they’ve been trained with these Instagram and Instagram-like social media images, therefore that’s what they can do.
It’s part of the reason. Another big issue with current models is that their language understanding is very primitive. Something like “person standing” they can understand, but “one person with a red hat sitting and another standing behind them with a blue shirt” already fails. There will be red and blue things in the image, but they’ll be pretty arbitrarily spread across and not assigned to the person the prompt said.
That said, this won’t last for long. With Segment Anything we have AI that has a very good understanding of what is in an image, which should make training on arbitrary images much easier, as well as editing. We also have lots of research going into video and plenty of more powerful language models, that just haven’t yet integrated into image generation. Even just ControlNet and some inpainting can overcome most of those issues, it just takes a bit more manual work than a text prompt. There is also DraGan, which is an incredible powerful drag&drop approach to AI image editing, but due to using a completely different approach from StableDiffusion it is not yet properly integrated into other tools.