How can you tell if a video you watch is AI are their any clues ?
Even if you can tell today (and you usually can except in rare cases), then it's going to get increasingly difficult, so the same advice won't apply in 12 months time. We've already reached a point where studies have proved that your regular average Joe can't effectively distinguish between a real audio clip of somebody talking and an AI-generated clip. The same is now also the case with AI-generated art. People tend to overestimate their ability to tell them apart, but under double-blind testing, they can't.
But to be a bit more helpful than that, if we're talking about what's out there today (like Sora 2), OpenAI actually digitally fingerprint those in an invisible way so they can tell if a video has come from them.
For us laymen, the telltale signs:
- The physics usually feel intuitively "floaty" in AI videos, as if nothing has any actual weight.
- You can sometimes tell when looking at more static parts of the video, there is often a kind of visual 'noise' which is basically an aliasing artefact, you can also see this happening with people's hair, it looks "twitchy". This is quite noticeable with Sora 2.
- People's skin and features can often look unrealistically perfect, but it's worth bearing in mind a lot of photoshop/video tools can also produce that kind of effect.
- Focus on the background and not the main feature of the video. There is sometimes a lack of object permanence in the backgrounds, though this has improved a lot, sometimes you will see things suddenly cease to exist, or things look abnormal.
Despite knowing these signs, I have seen videos recently where I genuinely wouldn't have clocked it was AI but somebody has pointed it out. It's one thing to be actively looking for all these things, it's another to think to look for them when you're not expecting you'd need to (because you are in a feed where you're only expecting real content and your brain is switched off).
www.reuters.com
