If you can spot AI content today....

[ergophobe]

You won't be able to next year.

I was going to add this to the "I'm sick of hearing about" thread because I'm getting pretty tired of people saying things like, "It's so obvious when it's AI content because it's just crap."

What they really mean is that they are unable to discern 80% of AI content and the 20% they can discern is so bad that it really bothers them.

My guess is that the people who complain the loudest about this are the ones least likely to recognize AI content. It reminds me of the 1980s when I would be standing with a couple of gay friends and a fourth person and someone would go by and the fourth person would look at the person going by and say, "That guy is gay. I can always tell," while being oblivious to the fact that he was talking to two gay men.

Anyway...

Check out the crusty old sailor video that Veo generated. Is it perfect? Not yet. If you played this for someone 25 years ago, would they think for one second that it had been generated from a simple text prompt? I think not, but I think they would notice a few odd glitches in the matrix - cadence. Still to go from a simple text prompt to that is mind boggling.

https://deepmind.google/models/veo/


Attached:

1. Climber
A still photo that I generated using Gemini with a prompt like (I closed the window so I don't have the exact prompt): "Create a photorealistic image of a rock climber climbing a crack high above the Valley floor. Add 4-6 camming devices to his harness."

Note that it doesn't seem to know what camming devices are, so it doesn't add them.

On the one hand, I would say it still has very much an AI feel, a strong Uncanny Valley feel. If you showed someone this image 10 years ago, they would likely assume someone had gone overboard with the airbrush and softening tools in Photoshop.

The last time I did this, proportions were wrong, positions didn't make sense in terms of the physics and sometimes not even in terms of the geometry. In six months it has gone from obvious and clear fake to a very good fake with a slight uncanny valley feel.

And keep in mind this is a free tool with minimal prompt refinement. I'm guessing that the free tool has fewer diffusion steps, which is what gives it that vaguely fake, airbrushed feel. With more diffusion steps, you get more detail and more photo realism (to a point).

2. Singer on car
The second attachment is from the Midjourney subreddit, sorted to put the "best" posts close to the top. Some of them are still obviously AI-generated, but some are getting very hard to tell. I thought this image of a woman on the hood of a car would not have triggered any Uncanny Valley alarms five years ago.

My instinct when I look deeply at the second image is to say there is an error in rendering the face around the right eye, but now that I am called in to troubleshoot my wife's portraits sometimes, I realize that in fact this is probably correct.

[ergophobe]

Good looking, but I had to filter her [Syndey Sweeney].

Not nearly as good looking as the AI models I have been seeing ;-)

Note: I know nothing about Sydney Sweeney, so I'm not talking about her in particular, but based on what I'm seeing, if your primary selling point is that you are beautiful, you will be out of a job in 1-2 years unless you are already famous enough that your name means something for an endorsement.

In particular, pay attention to products for older people. This may be because I'm now of an age where I qualify for Social Security and senior this and senior that, but I am seeing a lot of super buff AI models, men and women. Basically the bodies of 36yos on steroids, but with grey hair and wrinkles.

If you go down that rabbit hole for 6-8 clicks, you quickly go from seniors to "perfect" women. There are currently three ways to guess that something is AI

1. Artifacts - essentially the "airbrush" effect I mentioned in still photos or something resembling JPEG artifacts when looking at AI video. I figure that just like we rarely see this with JPEGs anymore because bandwidth and compute power make higher res and higher quality the standard, this will be coming to AI soon.

2. Too perfect. In the same way that for a while you could spot AI writing by the lack of typos and grammatical errors, these models look like "perfect" humans. I expect this to change soon. We've already seen it with text where students are adding imperfection prompts. I think AI graphic artists will be adding imperfection prompts to their images of humans too

3. Still lots of the world that LLMs don't understand. Climbing is pretty mainstream these days, but not like golf. So the AI images I've tried to create of climbers and the ones that I've seen online get the gear wrong. Sometimes it's a jumble of junk that at first glance looks like climbing gear, but upon inspections is a random amalgam of aluminum.

Still, based on what I'm seeing in #2, the images of those with "perfect jeans" like Sydney will not be human in the very near term.

Also, a thing I'm not quite understanding, is that there are some AI models that appear over and over and over. I know going back years in 3D modeling, models (meaning objects, not necessarily human models) would get shared and remixed. So you would see the same cars, same people, same houses in 3D video animations. I think there are some "stock" models that get remixed in the AI world now too. I think there might even be a couple of stock models on their way to becoming famous.

[rcjordan]

IMO, the Old Sailor you posted is already good enough quality to displace human talent in maybe the majority of online ads.

Nice post, btw.

[rcjordan]

+

add porn actors to the Dead Jobs Morgue

[littleman]

>porn

Bodes poorly for future reproduction.  Reality is going to be shockingly imperfect to reproductive age humans pretty soon.  Stack that onto the pile of reasons birth rates are falling.

[ergophobe]

IMO, the Old Sailor you posted is already good enough quality to displace human talent in maybe the majority of online ads.

Nice post, btw.

Thanks.

So... TikTok ads are already doing it at scale.
https://www.tiktok.com/@tiktoknewsroom/video/7382934469679959342

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/17/business/tiktok-ai-avatars.html

Google is supposedly offering it, but I haven't seen it. But they are doing real-time translation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyXqcsWOONo&t

[ergophobe]

AI Isn't Coming for Hollywood. It's Already Arrived
https://longreads.com/2025/08/21/hollywood-stability-ai/

Mostly paywalled...

[ergophobe]

4,000,000 AI stock video clips om Adobe site

https://stock.adobe.com/search/video?filters%5Bcontent_type%3Avideo%5D=1&filters%5Bgentech%5D=only&filters%5Breleases%3Ais_include%5D=1&filters%5Breleases%3Ais_exclude%5D=1&order=relevance&limit=100&search_type=filter-select&search_page=1&get_facets=1

In case wrapping breaks that URL, click here

[ergophobe]

AI models appear in Vogue for Guess
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgeqe084nn4o

Don't worry, Guess exec says that AI will never displace real models. So that's settled. I think at this point, it's just a publicity stunt. I for one did not even know that Guess still existed as a brand, but I do now.

Here's a medley of AI models done with Veo 3, the same platform as the fisherman video
https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1lvl71v/vogue_ai_when_ai_models_go_full_savage_video/

Interview with the creators of the Guess ads
https://www.buzzfeed.com/natashajokic1/vogue-guess-ai-models-explained

For those who hate video, this one is 8 seconds
https://x.com/babaeizadeh/status/1924942128851124284

Here's the IG page of the people who did the Guess ads
https://www.instagram.com/seraphinnevallora/?hl=en

[rcjordan]

>So that's settled.

Absolutely. hhh

did not even know that Guess still existed as a brand

[ergophobe]

did not even know that Guess still existed as a brand

Honestly, that's probably because you were happily married and moved onto other concerns by the late 1980s when Claudia Schiffer was the face (and body) of Guess and known to most young men with youthful hormone levels.

The picture on the left was iconic back then. That, I think, is the only reason I know about Guess jeans
https://www.elle.com/uk/fashion/news/g7385/claudia-goes-back-to-guess/

I think she was better known that Sydney Sweeney ;-)

[ergophobe]

OpenAI released their new video engine. The results are stunning

https://sora.chatgpt.com/p/s_68dd5f4a0c9c8191a72bb485cb2f0a6b

Current selection of "front page" videos
https://sora.chatgpt.com/

[littleman]

Very impressive.  I wonder how long it take for us to have full length movies that are 100% AI generated and people won't be able to tell the difference?

Also wondering if in the future people will gravitate more towards plays and other love performances to get away from AI.

I could also see people losing touch with what reality looks like.

[ergophobe]

I've kind of been wondering some of the same things.

I've also been wondering when I watch a move today, how many are human actors with 100% green screen? The "sets" have become sumptuous because they aren't sets. I watched some of Untamed which takes place in Yosemite and a lot of the scenery shots are fabricated in some way or another. In other words, you see an element that exists in Yosemite (random shot of the south entrance) combined into a scene that definitely does not exist in Yosemite (random mountain from somewhere else or from AI).

I read an interview with an actor recently who said he really enjoyed making some movie because the director believes he gets better performances with live sets and so, unlike many of the actor's recent projects, it wasn't all done on a sound stage with green screen.

And that has raised your last question. People know the show is not actually filmed in Yosemite, but will the expect that towering mountain above the south entrance? Will they expect that the scenery surrounding El Cap on the show is what they will see when they see El Cap?

>> plays

I think of this with reference to what happened after the Milli Vanilli scandal. After that, MTV launched the whole Unplugged series where they basically guaranteed that, other than amplification, the musicians on stage were playing the music entirely by themselves and live.

And I think that's when concert tickets started to climb out of control. In an era when most recorded music in history is free or close to free, concert tickets are more expensive than ever, because people want to be there live. The recorded experience has less and less value even though, generally speaking, the audio quality is much better. The live experience has more and more value partly because it's "real" and partly because it's exclusive. Mostly because it's exclusive.

That said, people also consume more recorded music than ever and certain consume a lot less live music than they did 150 years ago.

[nffc]

>Also wondering if in the future people will gravitate more towards plays and other love performances to get away from AI.

I think the "cool kids" will be hanging around in bookstores/live events etc. The question is will that be profitable for the venues? I've been putting on a few concerts over in Vietnam (pics on request) still hugely popular. I just think for "real" experiences the bar has been raised, everything needs to be extra special.