Asklemmy

This video by Corridor Digital breaks it down pretty well for less tech-savvy people, but they have more videos that go in greater depth about spotting AI trickery.

Start with the assumption the video is fake. Do you trust the source? If the video is of something outrageous, did you notice something feels uncanny? Does the lighting, shot angle, and proportions make sense?

If the answer is not yes, no, yes then it’s probably AI

Because even on the best drugs, my cat never says those things. He just refuses to cut the blue wire out of spite.

Alot of voices are still pretty bad, like words and voice sound good, but their tone and emphasis is off for what they are saying.

Subtle unnatural movements. Everything looks too nice and perfect. Uncanny facial expressions.

For animal videos: everytime there are videos of animals acting too human, mostly in terms of showing human-like affection, its AI.

Situations that are too fantastical to be real. An example could be a video I saw of a guy in a ski lift and a big snow owl lands on his shoulder.

In general: objects or subjects lacking realistic weight and/or physicality to them.

Noticing inconsistencies in the background where objects or subjects melt together, like a person in the background merging with a chair or a bookshelf for a second.

Also, different videos with very specific scenarios like for example surveilance footage of wild animals running through screen doors and into a house while a human is sleeping on the couch or different videos of go pro footage of people in Rollercoasters that go off the rails and fly into the air.

Things like these, I have noticed.

It's getting harder and harder but some things still seem to work:

• emotional emphasis on the wrong syllables
• dissonance between facial expressions and vocal delivery
• AI writing giveaways (it's not A it's B etc.)
• dreamlike / "floaty" motion
• unrealistic "depth of field" (objects don't blur properly with distance)
• unrealistic lighting / coloring / appears stylized despite the attempted hyperrealism
• object permanence problems / subtle drift in sizes and proportions over time

It's worth pointing out that whatever tips you get here, accurate though they may be today, are likely to be less accurate with time and this tech is improving at a rapid pace so if this is important to you, you'll have to keep on top of what techniques for discernment are current at any given time or if there even remain any reliable techniques at all.

Looks like eventually it's all going to come down to context and your assessment of the trustworthiness of the source. If something is so sensational it seems unbelievable and you don't have much trust in the source from which you saw it, it probably is literally unbelievable until further corroboration emerges. This is a pretty exhausting model when modern live involves so much media consumption but I'd advise that there's also an element of practicality you should incorporate in to your evaluation. You'll have to decide if the answer to the question "is this AI?" is important for any given situation before actually investing any time or energy in to answering it. Sometimes you might get the calculation wrong and it turned out that by assuming something was innocuous enough not to matter one way or the other you ended up being misinformed about something that actually was important but at the end of the day we're only mere mortals and can sometimes be wrong.

Perfect framing is often a giveaway. Most people's phone footage wobbles and moves around. Background object permanence is another thing to look out for

The Corridor Crew have done a couple of videos where they explain a lot of the things to look for and the reason AI finds it hard. Some examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4TXO4kQwSQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hI9T4jnrSI

A better question would be, how do I avoid being gullible with images and video so realistic?

Honestly, we're quickly moving into "assume AI unless proven otherwise" territory.

The tells are getting subtler but currently a good tell is the camera work. If the video looks amateurish (grainy, blurry), but the video is more stable than a $60k gimbal mounted movie grade model with active scene stabilization, it's probably AI. Another giveaway is motion morphing items from hammerspace where there's a visible "seam" where the LLM is trying to reconcile two prompts. (example: you see a video of a horse rider, and the bridle and reins might suddenly decrease in length instead of becoming taught when the rider wishes the horse to stop, or you may see objects morph into existence from other structures, but so fast you might have to rewatch it a few times to catch it.)

Whenever I don’t like the video or the person in it it’s ai.

The same way you know if there's the Fae.

• Count the fingers
• Look for irregularities
• See where the glamour shimmers
• Ask them for their name

I would be concerned with the type of media I'm consuming in the first place if ai can make it problematic

Don't assume that recognizing fakes is a younger generation thing. Maybe the people spotting them grew up reading snopes and alt.folklore.urban so that they have a good idea of how urban legends, hoaxes and clickbait are constructed.

That guys voice.

Plus, minor grammatical errors. eg. "Has increased the Tens of times"

Also, Bruce Lee having a fight.

Checking the channel that uploaded can also give a clue. A lot of the slop channels just flood variations of the same thing. They just post a thousand generated videos of different dog doing the exact same thing or "people" having the exact same fight etc.

They always look a bit shiny/glossy

discern what’s real from what’s created to play with my emotions and generate money for the creator or advance an agenda.

Not mutually exclusive.

When AI can make a convincing facsimile of something, that thing in its genuine form is already hollow and manipulative.

I wouldn't bother learning, whatever you learn today could be out of date in a year and could overall be impossible in less than 5 years. historically people would believe whatever title you slap on a youtube video regardless of if the video even tried to demonstrate the claim or not. I'd focus on authoritative and reliable sources and just be an open minded but also vigilant skeptic of claims you have no practical way to validate.