Identifying fake cosmetics using AI(groverlab.org) |
Identifying fake cosmetics using AI(groverlab.org) |
Whaaaattt? How could the author go through such detail and discover that Gemini completely failed in the assigned task (calling all the products fakes when some were and some weren't means that it provided zero correct assistance in this discrimination task) and then conclude "AI could play a helpful role"??? Does the author also conclude that stopped clocks could play a helpful role telling time because the are correct twice a day?
Apparently AI isn't the only thing that hallucinates.
Gemini wrongly called an authentic product a fake, but that was mainly because there really were typographical errors in the authentic product's ingredient list. That's more of an indictment of the manufacturer than it is Gemini.
Finally, a lot of the things that Gemini got wrong seemed to me like they could reasonably be attributed to things like optical artifacts in the photos (glare, shadows, stuff like that). Better/more photos might improve that.
All that being said, this is obviously a tiny study of a single AI tool with a single brand of cosmetic product, so it's probably premature for me to optimistic, even cautiously. I've edited the last section of the writeup accordingly.
Very odd conclusion to an otherwise interesting experiment.
- https://groverlab.org/research/2022-05-06-candycodes.html
- https://groverlab.org/research/2026-03-19-disintegration-fin...
(edit: Formatting)
Even if these techniques did not produce false positives on genuine products, I suspect that they would not scale well. If counterfeiters realized they were losing a lot of sales through AI detection, they will just use AI to catch the errors themselves.
I'm hopeful that future AI models (perhaps trained for this purpose, not a general-purpose model like I used here) might be able to identify more subtle variations in e.g. injection molding patterns, the surface finish of a pill, things that would be hopefully a lot harder for counterfeiters to fix than a typo.
As well as the fact they have already done well enough to fool almost all buyers.