Ask HN: How can we reliably verify content isn't AI generated?

4 points by humbleferret 358 days ago | 6 comments

AI generated media is rapidly becoming indistinguishable from human work. I feel the days of AI content feeling or looking 'off' are vanishing. With some AI generated videos like those from Veo 3 becoming so realistic, I'm already having to look twice, genuinely questioning if they're ai-generated or not.

How can we realistically maintain the distinction going forward? Is widespread, mandatory watermarking the only answer, or is it a technically flawed/doomed approach? And as AI content likely floods the internet, will we, and how could we, even try to filter or avoid it?

vouaobrasil 358 days ago |

> Is widespread, mandatory watermarking the only answer, or is it a technically flawed/doomed approach?

I don't see how you could seriously trust a technical solution like that. All technical solutions can be pretty much broken. In my opinion, you also need to build up a web of trust of people who are definitely against AI and who make it prominent that they refuse to use any generative AI content. For example, on my YouTube channel I make that abundantly clear, and on the website I work for we also have an anti-AI statement.

A better "technical" solution would be to build a platform that attracts like-minded people. Yes, once it gets large it might be flooded with AI content/bots, but the trick is not to let it get large, nor go for a large profit at first along the lines of typical technology solutions. The internet is flooded with AI content not because AI suddenly and rapidly came to exist, but because there was a niche for it.

Personally, I hate AI, with a passion. Find people who create and write and who hate AI and it's a start.

zolotorevich 358 days ago |

If it’s was published before 2022

icedchai 358 days ago |

The sad truth is you can't.

owebmaster 358 days ago |

You can't. If it is good enough for your entertainment, you should not care if it was generated with the help of AI or not. AI slop is easy to spot tho.

techpineapple 358 days ago |

Welcome to the future, we don’t have flying cars or affordable housing, but we do have AI slop that’s indistinguishable from the real thing!

vouaobrasil 358 days ago | |

Regarding affordable housing, I don't really think the main goal of technology is the improvement of life any more. It may have been in the early days, or at least that could have been the intention of the earlier inventors, but now it's about optimizing technological growth. And with regard to housing, it's probably much more optimal for housing to be expensive so that people fight hard to use and develop new technology to keep up with the costs.

After all, if we were more collectively oriented, we could theoretically come up with a future where we work very little and have a stable society, but human beings are just in a massive game of endless iterations of the prisoner's dilemma which is powering the development of new and mostly needless technologies.