I struggle to tell. And the AI image generators are only going to get better. I fear we are going to spend the next years debating if something is real or AI.

I read an online conversation where people said that billionaires like those in the Epstein files would have loved to use the excuse that the implicating images of them were AI generated by Epstein.

I saw a reel of Ghibli's The Wind Rises, and it was just full of haters confidently exclaiming that it's AI slop. If you run it through a standard detector, it would probably trigger them too - the yellowed background, the distorted animation and exaggerated facial expressions.

There's the famous 4 second crowd scene which took a year to draw. This looks incredibly AI now. It's highly unlikely studios will manually draw things like this in the future.

A lot of people have just given up separating them. A friend only searches for images made before 2021 because they're not AI made.

I think it's really sad, because it hurts the artists most of all.

And this is where those in power are headed: to use AI to sow misinformation and disinformation across all forms of media until people trust nothing but what other people tell them to trust. They become trivially easy to lead in whatever direction is needed.

You can see this in how conservatism has evolved over the last two decades. The bottom-99% of all conservatives have been so badly brainwashed and gaslit that they actively vote against their own best interests, such that the oligarchs and other members of the Parasite Class benefit enormously.