The vibe I'm getting, they try to make it look real by making it dull.

The problem with AI images is that they don't make sense and by making the image dull, it reduces the urge to make sense of it I guess.

AI images have very low fidelity. You know the "A picture is worth a thousand words" phrase? I think AI images fail on that because they are not an instance of a very complex system but a very concentrated subject if you know what i mean.

When someone captures a picture of a dog, that's actually a picture of a story about the past; That is, the surrounding environment is arranged in a way that you can tell what just happened moments ago or years ago. AI Pictures lack that story and that's why I think the dull images are easier to pass as real because they don't induce you to think about the moments ago.

so a few days back, I discovered that with the new Flux v1.1 pro image gen model, if you use a prompt like "IMG_XXXX.HEIC", you get some extremely realistic images.

I spent a few hours playing around with it, trying out a ton of combinations. Ended up with a very large library of images and decided to make a quick website to share it.

Some notes and observations:

1. Using a prompt like "IMG_XXXX.HEIC" tends to yield the most realistic images, but most of these tend to be rather mundane images of landscapes, flowers, poorly shot cityscapes

2. Adding "IMG_XXXX.HEIC posted on Snapchat in [year]" yields more realistic, casual images of people. However, a lot of these look like screenshots, complete with the Snapchat UI. Most people also tend to be attractive.

3. Adding a [year] in the prompt yields some interesting images. Like [2017] will yield blurrier images than [2023]. Adding [2021] in the prompt got images with face masks and face shields

4. The prompt "[firstName] [lastName] selfie" gets real-looking selfies of real-looking people. You can use Indian, Hispanic, Chinese, European, American, etc. names and get realistic images of people with these ethnicities. Example: https://d1l4k1vcf8ijbs.cloudfront.net/fakeimages/pc5JnhNRUEq...

5. There is a decently high failure rate. The ~750 images on the site are hand picked. I had to delete around 220 images for not meeting the criteria (not real enough) or being just bizarre

6. If this model is any indication, its soon going to be impossible to tell what's real online

Congrats, they do look good at first glance, without the usual overly shiny look, and the pure Nature images do look real to me. I'd really like to visit some of these places.

However, details are still off, e.g.

* the guy you linked to apparently sits in a car, but the ceiling looks like a house (at least I've never seen a vehicle like that). Reversed issue with this guy: https://d1l4k1vcf8ijbs.cloudfront.net/fakeimages/EeJBCnNsZG1...

* the bicycle guy sits in the air, and the bike is mutated in several places: https://d1l4k1vcf8ijbs.cloudfront.net/fakeimages/WrfWYZlthe2...

* The face in Yoga in the field is distorted: https://d1l4k1vcf8ijbs.cloudfront.net/fakeimages/BUcURAtyzjb...

* Hands are ok-ish but not yet solved: https://d1l4k1vcf8ijbs.cloudfront.net/fakeimages/SeO8u2HZ-V2...

* Any text is obviously fake, which also affects urban environments. Agree with this caption: https://d1l4k1vcf8ijbs.cloudfront.net/fakeimages/oc6eI5w2kQQ...

Bonus points for this portrait where the tower seems to have a face as well: https://d1l4k1vcf8ijbs.cloudfront.net/fakeimages/6ho0FIV-i2t...

I guess the question is: Who cares? What is this for, except illustrating blogspam?

It seems that more resources are being poured into verisimilitude across generative models, but what is the business model or even human use case for it?

A picture of a glorious landscape seems worthless to me without any grounding to be able to ask a question like, "where is that?", "when do those flowers bloom?", "what is on the other side of that mountain?" and receive any kind of interesting answer.

This trick has been floating around for about a week -- earliest ref I could find:

https://x.com/fofrAI/status/1841854401717403944

I spend an inordinate amount of time looking at plants and pictures of plants and the first image I was shown prominently displays a species very familiar to me. Only, it's subtly wrong, with weirdness along the edges. It jumped straight of the page and distracted me from the rest of the image. Oh well, real life sucks anyway

In the near future, will be even want to share real photos and videos?

Why actually travel when you can easily generate photos and videos of yourself doing all sorts of things in all sorts of places?

I can't even tell what's real and what's AI. I'm actually more likely to assume an authentic image is AI!

I wonder how far into generative AI will have people developing "intractable FOMO" where they see a beautiful place but then they find out they can't visit it because it doesn't exist.

Are we seeing it already from people who are getting irrationally angry about generative AI?

Until AI generated imagery has been tested by the legal system it may be a bit too optimistic to call this "Royalty-free, copyright-free gallery of images".

How different from a source image do these AI generated images need to be to be considered "copyright free"?

If I grab a series of photos from shutterstock, run them through a generative AI photo enhance process to improve the white balance, contrast and levels is that adequate enough to be considered "copyright free"?

Still pretty easy to spot on some of these at least. The dog in a park, the collar is obviously off. The cyclist on a dirt trail, the bike is completely whackadoo. Anything with small, specific details.

Of course, in a few years (months?), models will get better at this, and even those tells will fade away.

Throw these into a captioning system to generate captions, index those captions with something like ElasticSearch and voila!

Great work! I think you have a business similar to Lummi[0] if you:

- Enhance search capabilities

- Add a paid API

- Add a whole lot more images :)

Other royalty free image APIs out there like Unsplash[1] have difficult licensing terms. AI is poised to disrupt this space.

[0]: https://www.lummi.ai [1]: https://unsplash.com/developers

Even as a big supporter of image gen ai, I don't like realistic "photos". I remember hitting photorealism and proudly showing them to my wife and she goes "awesome, where is this?" Something about the fact that these were completely fake and not real absolutely sunk the value of them for me. It's a fraud - there's no history in the image, no true cultural value. It's not a capture of a place or emotion, it's a mimic. The architecture not real, the people never existed, the animals incorrectly visualized, the light doesn't behave as real light would etc etc.

I think the sweet spot currently is in obviously fake stylized images or illustration/3dish type stuff. I know artists reject that, but I think it will eventually become a paintbrush of sorts for them, not replacing them anymore than code gen ai replaces software engineers.

Another angle on it - I think there's something really wrong consuming fake images of real life but thinking they're real. It's like the visual equivalent of artificial cancer causing sweetener. I would want to know if the blog image I'm looking at is ai generated or not.

Your website is loading forever, is it down?