AI-generated depiction of the blaze in Las Médulas de León, not a genuine photograph.
In the realm of social media, a false image has been circulating, purportedly showing firefighters exhausted amidst a burning mountain, supposedly from the fires in Spain or Portugal. However, this image is not a real image; it's generated using artificial intelligence (AI).
The image, which has been shared over 3,000 times since August 13, was originally published in a Facebook post and has been cropped to omit the part indicating it's a digital creation. It has been accompanied by tags such as "#lasmedulas #leon #incendio" on social media, but it has not been published by any communication media or news agencies in Spain reporting on the fires.
The image has been the subject of hoaxes before, previously circulated as showing firefighters who had died in Portugal. The message accompanying the image claims: "Exhausted. Half of Spain is burning".
Analysis by the IVERES project's AI-created content detection tool reveals the image as false with over a 99% confidence prediction. Similarly, the AI detection tool from Hive predicts the image contains content generated with AI with a 99% confidence.
Several common traits can help distinguish AI-generated images from real ones, although it is often difficult and humans only identify them correctly about 62% of the time. Some key signs that can indicate an AI-generated image include:
- Abnormal or unnatural details: Such as strangely positioned limbs or incoherent elements in the background.
- Mistakes in text: AI-generated images sometimes show misspelled or nonsensical text embedded in signs or labels within the image.
- Unnatural sharpness distribution: AI images may have an overly sharp foreground but a blurry background as a shortcut in rendering.
- Uniform texture and excessive smoothness: AI images often lack natural grain or fuzziness, especially in darker areas, resulting in features being too perfectly detailed without the typical noise of real images.
- Facial or human features: AI-generated human faces can look overly perfect, with unusually smooth skin, bland or strange expressions, or contorted body positions lacking a natural "soul" or emotion.
- Contextual clues: Sometimes AI images appear too perfectly aligned with a certain narrative or theme, which can be a hint they are generated rather than captured.
Despite these signs, recognizing AI-generated images is challenging. According to a large Microsoft study involving over 12,000 participants doing 287,000 image evaluations, people correctly distinguished AI from real photos only 62% of the time, just slightly better than random guessing. The difficulty varies with type of image; participants were more accurate with human portraits but struggled more with landscapes.
Due to the high realism of AI models like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney, detection is becoming harder and requires more sophisticated tools beyond human eyes. Automated AI detection tools exist and tend to be more reliable than humans, but they also make errors and remain imperfect.
In summary, while some general visual cues—such as abnormalities, text errors, unnatural sharpness, and overly perfect human features—can suggest AI origin, distinguishing AI-generated images from real ones remains difficult even for humans and is an active area for developing better detection technologies. It is crucial for social media users to exercise caution and verify the authenticity of images before sharing them.
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