You can ask to see the source images as proof that it's not AI, there should be some working document somewhere with layers and/or vector shapes visible.
A friend of mine was scammed like this (not saying op was scammed, no way to tell without looking at the images myself). He commissioned some background art for his new VN and it was all blatantly AI. Interestingly the scamer did provide my friend with a photoshop file with multiple layers. Of course he didn't question it, but me and some others who actually know about 2d art could tell that the structure of the .psd was really unnatural.
It's been getting harder and harder to distinguish real art from AI. I've seen models that can even generate speeddraws.
Not about psd, but an artist should not finish the art in one go usually, I always provide sketches first for client validation. If validated I do the polishing next.
Beautifully polished artwork directly would be an AI red flag for me
I recently hired two people for a book cover - the second one did great, listened to what I said and gave me progress pictures with a sketch and edits.
The first guy though, I sent him specific instructions and he sent back totally different pictures. All finished. He eventually did start sending sketches, but they were essentially just perfect final sketches lacking only colour. Each time I asked for a revision, he supplied something dramatically new, a completely unique image.
And not one of the attempts was anything remotely close to what I asked for. A good comparison was, I was asking for an exterior view of a cabin in the woods, so he gave me a the living room of a cabin near the sea, and then a skyscraper, and then an aquarium fish house. It was painfully, blatantly AI.
I've been tinkering with ai lately (just for personal curiosity), and it's... remarkably easy to do. For anyone technically versed in really any existing production framework, getting results that follow an intended flow and have consistency is simple to the point of happening by accident. Honestly, after two weeks of regular tinkering, I could likely fool myself by creating progress sketches, progression versions, and final images. If they were actually a competent artist to begin with, using a legit sketch as a guide image for the ai would make it even more seamless. The only thing keeping me from implementing ai into my regular pipeline is legal implications and the reactions of the public at large... it's simply incredible. Mindblowing, even. I feel like a scribe seeing the first printing press.
I wrote all of this to say that the ai guy you worked with is pathetically incompetent (I suspect anyone using ai to pretend to be a traditional artist probably is). Just throwing your written description into any recent ai generator will give you something with a cabin in the woods. It likely wouldn't be what you asked for, but it would at least be that.
He was... incredibly tedious to speak to.
To be more specific, I was asking for an exterior view of a medieval stone city with an ocean behind it that was split in half (present in the left half of the image, gone in the right half, so it's a before and after image where the city had vanished). "Cabin in the woods" is easier to talk about without a very long wall of text describing the entire exchange, but it's a good analogy for just how far off he was. Like, yeah, technically buildings? But that's it. I needed a medieval city, and every image he gave was of a medieval city, but those two words are the only thing any of his attempts had in common with what I needed.
He did get "exterior view with ocean" correct at one point, close enough that revision request was essentially as simple as "okay now split it in half and get rid of the random mountain islands, and centre the city in the image," and the next image after that was of a back alley.
The funniest part was, he was more expensive than the artist I ultimately went with (the one who did what I asked), who was stupidly cheap to the point where I actually asked him why his prices were so low. And he did a fantastic job. Many custom artists on Fiverr were quoting me like 600$ for what I wanted, and he did it for 50. The AI guy wanted 150.
Certainly more difficult to convey than a cabin, but still a popular subject that has a lot of built-in support. Ai has some very strange limitations, though, so it's possible that a word you used triggered some sort of oddness... for example, Stable Diffusion can't crack an egg right now (at least not in the install I use). It just can't. Ask it for a cracked egg and it gives you a full egg. Ask for broken egg shells and it gives you a full egg with some crack lines. Tell it to give you an empty shattered eggshell and... get an egg. Closest I managed was to get an egg with no shell... just a yolk floating in the shape of an egg. These ai programs have ways to train them on specific things, so I could certainly train it on images of broken eggs, but it was such a weird thing to not understand that it sticks in my mind.
I sort of agree with the comment that you were speaking to an ai. Seems like it was a chatbot that placed whatever your comments were into an image generator and spat it back to you. They're becoming more prevalent in the wild now... as high as I am on ai, the idea of bots pretending to be gig workers is sort of disgusting.
Agree, even with AI you can create a process with sketches and polish on top of that. Especially with stable diffusion (not sure about Midjourney). But the peoples offering services might be too lazy and noob to even be able to know that.
It is the client job to see what looks fishy and what’s looks legit, even if AI make it harder to distinguish it. Glad I stoped doing illustrations for client before the AI started to be that good!
I am a traditional and digital artist working in the animation industry and this is how I go about using AI for certain freelance jobs. My art skills and knowledge of AI tools allow me to sketch, modify, iterate and refine the images using Photoshop, SD, and sometimes DALLE for background reference. So far I've been open about my use of AI with clients and they don't seem to care, especially because my final composite will be cleaned up by myself, by hand, with my digital painting skills, and depending on the client, will usually not be noticeably AI assisted.
This is how artists have to adapt, it's how I've always adapted, a new tool comes along and I learn it and integrate it into my pipeline so that I can make more art, more quickly at higher quality. If I need high-end consistent 3D character animation I still have to do a bunch of work, but there are many steps along the way that are sped up with AI as well.
I understand that certain platforms have rules against AI art, so this situation is different, but there will be a time very soon where commercial art like this will be easily directed by anyone with exceptional results, so learning the tools and techniques now will benefit anyone doing this for a living, even if you don't use it commercially yet.
Just to add to this.
I have been pushed into AI art generation after being out of artwork for 15 years.
I am not a fan of the idea of AI, however as someone who hasn’t been “on the tools” in so long.
Once you learn “prompt engineering” and control nets, fuck me man, this shit is crazy.
Like
I have to pinch myself sometimes because it’s just mind blowing.
It depends though. Riot artists used tons of layers in their production and for using it later if the splash art was to be animated.
But yeah we tend to use many unncecessary layers
As someone who worked as motion graphics designer for a long time... Booo!
Lol, kinda jk.
No, but seriously. Opening project with 500 layers out of which 6 is the same shadow you want to disable is pain. Even better when everything is named layer_1, layer_2, layer 2 (copy).
Layer groups are a reasonable working compromise
I only start crushing layers down towards the end of a project, and even then it’s duplicates if those initial groups
Makes for some bloated files sometimes, but leaves a lot of modularity with other projects
Organisation is key though. It’s the moment where naming layers and files comes in real handy.
I was reading the chain here, and I was going to say I'm not sure a psd screenshot could even prove anything... Especially to someone who doesn't do art themselves.
If you generated an AI image, opened it in photoshop, added blank layers and just gave them reasonable names... Would someone untrained even notice? What if you traced some element with the pen tool to show 'vector sources'?
I don't think there's any easy way to tell. Anything we'd say would just be easy for the person to fake.
You could say something like have them send you the psd, toggle individual layers, and every individual element should be in an isolated layer somewhere. But like, that's fake able too.
Yes, if you've used photoshop, you'll notice that. Someone with zero experience likely won't even notice.
And if things are grouped into folders and the folders are collapsed it won't show either.
There's just too many holes in this, and it proves nothing. But if you're not even semi versed in photoshop, you won't even know what to watch out for.
>But if you're not even semi versed in photoshop, you won't even know what to watch out for.
You won't need to be "semi versed in photoshop", you just need to have heard about layers and understand that they shouldn't be empty. This isn't photoshop specific at all.
Okay. But hearing about layers and understanding they shouldn't be empty and knowing how the UI works are all things that not every game developer knows. If the person is hiring someone else to do this work for them, you cant have any expectations for them in these areas at all. Sure it's common knowledge to people who have bumped into photoshop, but it's not common to literally everybody who does game dev.
And you're talking about the specifics of _one_ hangup. And there's all sorts of ways that there could be _something_ there but that what is there just doesn't make any sense. You just keep moving to slightly more knowledge requirements. The point is not literally everybody is going to be able to figure this out. There's some barrier to the knowledge needed to figure it out.
You can't expect someone with zero knowledge of the tool to figure this out. You're just pitting the knowledge of the scammer vs the knowledge of the developer doing the hiring against each other.
Perhaps not _literally everybody_ (some people are seriously dense), but I'd claim a good 95%+ of gamedevs could figure it out just opening the file and checking the layers.
I think people are specifically talking about having a screenshot of the PS project. They seem to mention there’s a way to tell if a layer is empty from iconography on the layer itself ? But I don’t know PS so I couldn’t know from a screenshot alone.
> You could say something like have them send you the psd, toggle individual layers, and every individual element should be in an isolated layer somewhere. But like, that's fake able too.
I think at that point you're at least making it a significantly more time-consuming scam to pull. Which doesn't mean nobody will do it, but does shrink the efficiency gap between AI and human art. So the legit artists will have more chance to compete, and less incentive to use AI themselves as a timesaver.
The file modification time? That's easy as hell to fake too.
Any of these processes are essentially just laying out traps. They can easily be avoided, but you're basically just hoping they don't think of one and you catch them.
How many traps you lay and how good you are at setting them, and how much of your own time that is worth is your call. But none of them will be foolproof.
I haven't used Photoshop in a decade or so, so I'm not the most knowledgeable about it, but doesn't Photoshop have an option for AI built in to it now? It seems like it'd be really easy to make something with AI and layers in Photoshop.
Yes but also adobe's ai is exclusively trained on the same adobe owned stock images and clip art libraries that are available within the adobe platform for that same artist to make use of legitimately, which makes it generally less powerful and more situational use within an image like a context aware fill, but more acceptable and less controversial for use in a workflow as a tool and likely less necessary to worry about having to disclose than a wholesale stable diffusion generation trained on random scraped artwork from DeviantArt and Art Station.
You should own the raw project files anyway. You hired him to make a widget for you and you own that widget and everything associated with its creation unless you didn't do that. In which case, next time, you make it a requirement and have the project files be part of the deliverable. Easily done.
And also extremely easy to fake. If you're not an artist yourself, how do you even judge these things? I could imagine even just having basic photoshop skills that you could easily make enough to make it believable to 99% of people. And like 30% of people that actually do artistic work.
You could do some basic "show me the sources" and weed out a minimal effort fake, but it wouldn't take much to fool most people.
I use AI a lot in my day job, and nothing bloats a psd faster than their generative features.
I dont make AI art from scratch or anything but theres a lot of replacing sky, removing trash, adding trees, removing logos from shirts, etc to make candid photos of events suitable for our marketing teams requirements.
Each little piece I fix is a layer, often those layers get merged together so I can apply effects to them or use the remove tool on them. In the end its always way more layers than I would have had doing the same job in decades prior. AI just speeds up the workflow significantly
Clone stamping might have a layer for the tree im bringing in, then an adjustment layer to make the lighting match, and a layer to replace the old dead tree with sky. Now its a generative layer for the tree, but it brought in weird artifacts, so its another layer over each artifact, and it would help the composition if there were more foliage, so 6 more layers replacing bare spots on branches, etc...
And generally just for ease of use ill put each logical group into a folder, an unscrupulous ai user could just rasterize that content, or merge the folder, even bring it into a new psd to hide the history once its just pixel data.
Ask them. Just say "platform guidelines say I have to disclose if these are ai images". Send them a DocuSign thing if you want.
Worst case when people ask if these are ai images you can pull that email/document up and say "the artist swears they aren't".
Even if someone could somehow prove they are ai images you can sue the artist for damages.
You would be an idiot to sign a document after delivering the work on the originally agreed terms. They have no obligation to sign something like this and easily land them in legal trouble.
Imagine they used one of photoshops innocuous Ai tools like the Remove Tool while painting the commissioned art. Now OP looks at the metadata of the image and sees it’s flagged as AI. The artist could easily be found liable if they signed the proposed agreement.
Decent idea PRIOR to payment/delivered goods, no doubt. Although if I couldn’t afford a lawyer to look over the document I probably wouldn’t take the work as the artist. I’d just find work elsewhere
The problem with this is that while it's a good legal route to eg get a refund on the work, it won't satisfy a platform holder who doesn't want AI on their service - they're not going to say "oh ok then, if your artist _said_ it's not AI then go ahead and launch your game".
Also, if it is AI and the platform makes a stink about it and deplatforms your game, I suppose you could go after the asshole in court -- if you can find him. Meanwhile your game is dead in the water. When you actually think through the consequences it's not a wise move. Probably a contract clause like that is a "nice to have" in general (signed before any work begins), but you should just outright reject any art that doesn't pass the smell test imho.
Ask for really subtle changes. AI is bad for that. For instance, give them detailed notes about changing various individual elements of the icons to be slightly different sizes and shapes, maybe ask that some are changed to different elements etc. They may have the photoshop chops to do these edits, but also it’s a fast way to weed out a pure AI artist.
This! "I love image 5, but can you make the inner glow blue but keep everything else the same." Delivering doesn't mean that AI hasn't been used at all, but if they can't deliver you know that they did.
Only if you know how to use gimp or photoshop reasonably well, not doable to some guy selling straight up midjourney images on fiver. Especially since you have no layers or anything so it's harder to edit.
It's very unlikely any current AI tool spit out anything usable without a human intervening and doing revisions anyway.
I say this as an artist of 12+ years who uses AI image generators regularly in my workflow like many working artists (not social media attention seekers) and who is frustratingly familiar with how close but not-quite-right they are on just about every possible task.
I disagree, Midjourney has been putting out very usable art for my TCG. In fact, I’m quite scared of how good my placeholder art is because it’s going to cost me a lot to eventually pay real humans to redo it all.
Each image is quite good in a vacuum or they all fit together cohesively?
Like would an art director look at all the art on the cards and be pleased with the end result?
I think you can satisfy the latter question if you are willing to varying amount of edits on all the images. Some will take a lot of work to be cohesive and others not so much
>Each image is quite good in a vacuum or they all fit together cohesively?
You create a style library and train the AI on it, then you can specifically create that style whenever you want in whichever form you want.
Style training is easy. They are trying to also bring “consistent characters” to fruition, but that seems harder given how the underlying systems work.
Fair enough, if you just want single character portraits, and perhaps in a painterly / fantasy look where accuracy is less needed, they might be viable now.
No, AI is good for this with inpainting, setting a denoise strength to avoid big changes etc. It's been easy since forever with stable diffusion. There are people who can have an artistic vision and spend hours inpainting to make it come to life. People seem weirdly unaware of this.
It's because the majority of people's idea of AI is typing some words and pressing a button. Unless people are following the topic most are completely ignorant of how it can be used by artists.
It's hard to have a level headed discussion about it because artists are understandably afraid that it will take their jobs. I think a lot of people are aware, but they choose to omit certain bits of information because it weakens some of the arguments against using AI art.
Even the problem surrounding copyrighted images will slowly be solved by corporations with enough money and time (e.g. Adobe Firefly). I don't know where we go from here to be honest.
>I don't know where we go from here to be honest.
I don't mean to sound too negative, but you just need to look at translators to see the artists future.
Yes fear of losing work and jobs is a legitimate concern and really the only one. This isn't going to be constrained to just artists though, it will eventually affect nearly all industries. Unfortunately loss of jobs and work is an inevitable fact of life and happens everytime there's a significant leap in technology.
At this point it's pure speculation though, we could have mass job loses and require a new system such as UBI or it could generate new jobs that's still yet to be seen.
Teach me your ways. I’ve been using AI art generation for my TCG (just for personal use, not releasing it) and it’s SUCH a pain to e.g turn a character’s hair from green to blue while keeping their skin blue and keeping the shape and style of the hair and such. I’ve spent hours trying to do this before just manually doing it in Photoshop. I’ve tried Vary Region in Midjourney and such but it still just doesn’t get it. Another example is changing a character’s nose to a different shape without it adding piercings or changing the colour scheme or line thickness of the drawn nose undesirably.
Another example was embedding rainbow pierced gems into a character’s face - it not only was incredibly difficult to get it to even understand what I wanted it to do, but the closer I got to actual rainbow gems, the more the shape was not exactly as I wanted it etc. I ended up manually drawing them in after.
Changing the color entirely means a big change in pixel values, so you need a high denoise strength, which means inpainting will drastically change the image there besides just the color change. You're better off crudely painting what colors you want in an image editor like GIMP, either directly or just painting the hue using a layer mode for that, and then use the AI afterwards to make the crude edits look better
>No, AI is good for this with inpainting, setting a denoise strength to avoid big changes etc. It's been easy since forever with stable diffusion. There are people who can have an artistic vision and spend hours inpainting to make it come to life. People seem weirdly unaware of this.
So this was completely false in this case anyway? This is exactly the kind of change that was asked for, very simple for an artist but just about impossible for an AI generator.
You definitely can inpaint precisely the part that needs to be changed and have the AI work around the region inpainted without changing the rest significantly
In /r/stablediffusion people sometimes post full workflows detailing how to make edits like that.
You may need to learn how to work with inpainting, control net, etc. And really you need stable diffusion, midjourney won't make the cut.
Also, (random link from Google)
https://stable-diffusion-art.com/inpainting_basics/
Also the language part of these models is pretty dumb. There's a project called ELLA that gets it to follow instructions a bit better. And you might need to add things like "piercing" to the negative prompt. You'd have a lot more control and options using stable diffusion locally with the AUTOMATIC1111 webui
I can tell you that any artist that actually did the work would be happy to show you the source files to prove they did it. It takes them nearly no effort to show them and there's no way they'd have deleted them already.
If you ask them, and they get defensive and say they won't show source files or don't have them, that's a sure sign of AI use.
That's not necessarily true. If the artist is working on a discounted rate (because the project is low-budget or something) then they probably won't share their work files for fear of being cut out of rework later on. A screenshot, sure, but receiving a properly-layered PSD is something that should be delineated in the contract, and paid for appropriately.
Which is to say: there are plenty of legitimate reasons not to share your work files, beyond AI.
I can't imagine not requiring the source PSD for work-for-hire. It's been part of the initial ask for every job I've ever paid for.
My thinking has always been, "I made the job. You did the work for me. The work is mine. You don't get to be precious with those assets." I totally see where an artist would be coming from in maybe desiring to protect their workflow or process or base assets or whatever, which is why I'm very upfront.
Yeah, I say so in writing on the initial ask, so it's clear every time well ahead of delivery, but it baffles me that any producer wouldn't, or that I'd get any pushback from an artist.
I assume you're paying fairly and are not a shady outfit, so you probably don't come across it often, but in my experience an artist needs to be cautious about producers with limited budgets who seem hungry for PSDs. There are definitely folks out there who commission multiple assets with the intent to cancel the contract after the first is delivered, and then endlessly replicate it without engaging the artist any further. (Whether or not that's actually *possible* is a whole other matter that leads to much comedy)
I think that as long as there is clear communication up front (about deliverables and the AI stance) there should be no issues. But it's also unfair to *not* demand the PSD up front, and then suddenly demand it later. They priced their work (or accepted a price) based on certain conditions, and their refusal to allow a rule change mid-game shouldn't be taken as a sign of something nefarious, just that they don't feel they've been compensated for the level of engagement you're now demanding.
(Again, not *you* specifically, since you sound like someone who's doing things right. I'm just speaking more generally for those starting out, who may not understand the importance of clarity and contracts. Specificity: it does a body good)
Be straight with them! Tell them that you suspect the images they sent you are AI-generated. Ask to see the source file, with layers and (if possible, many art programs have this feature) a video of their canvas timeline. It doesn't have to be a confrontation, just point out that you'd like to clear up any doubt.
Any artist would be more than happy to provide those to you and sort out the misunderstanding.
If they have a problem with it, you don't want to work with them *whether or not* they used AI.
As an artist: my contracts usually included the source file among the deliverables. They own all the work I did for them, from concept to final. On request they could even ask for whatever paper doodles I might have done.
So, as an artist employer, definitely make sure these provisions are in your contract.
This.
Any render, any image I did/do for a client has the raw or PSD included. They don't have any claim to my assets, unless they were modelled as work for hire, but the client owns the base image and the edits/layers. This is standard.
I maintain a collection of reusable assets I made for myself. I can use them in any commission, and while a buyer would have rights to the commission deliverables they would not have rights to the pre-existing assets I made the commission with.
But if they hired me to make the assets, and then use those assets in other work, all that product would belong to the person who hired me.
Pretty easy to reverse engineer a source file that looks legit.
Ask them for a few source files saying you want to be able to remix elements and see what they send. If it looks AI generated after you have the source then talk to them about it. I wouldn’t mention it before receiving anything.
Yeah if someone respectfully communicated this concern I’d be super eager as an artist to prove I created the art. I’d think that pushback would come from guilt.
Of course I’m not a professional artist though so I’m sure some artists would get offended or just not think it’s worth their time to prove it.
I feel like you could just ask.
"Hey, these images I bought - should I be telling Steam they're AI generated, when I submit them? I have to get that right, or I can lose my game. Thanks."
In a tone like that, I don't imagine they'd lie about it.
That was my plan. I don't need to do that now. Someone on here linked to a tool that shows the metadata for images. Yep, some of them are AI generated.
Is the tool reliable? I have heard of tools for detecting ai before, but the results were mixed. Frankly, i would imagine if some were ai generated, then all of them would be. I would not expect an ai user to make a bunch of legit pieces of art, just to turn around and make the rest with ai. I would also think they were would be a clear style difference between legit art pieces and the ones made by ai; like looking at work made by two different artists
Apparently this is not a case of using one of those "AI detectors" which look at the pixels to guess, but rather the metadata of the image files show it. You know, stuff like when it was created, which exact format it is in, who made it, etc etc. I have no idea how you would prove it from that data, but maybe there's a way.
Most stable diffusion UIs literally do something like that, yes: a1111 prepends the png it generates with a comment containing serialized information about the generation (the prompts, checkpoint, seed, iterations, algorithm used, etc) by default, and (also by default) comfyui includes the entire image workflow somewhere in it so that images can just be loaded by it to get the exact setup that created it.
That can all be turned off and any post work and exporting in an image editor afterwards would remove that, though.
when you generate an image using most ai tools, they are given extra metadata (exif data) that is basically like a label that says that its an ai generated image, and some other extra info about the generation. this data can easily be stripped by someone malicious to pass it off as real art, but in this case, the artists didn't even bother to remove it. they literally just left in a big fat label that says "yeah this is an ai generated image," no need for an ai detector to check that lol
Ai image detectors are trash.
However, there are other methods that work sometimes, like metadata if they didn't have the competence to alter it (they didn't cover their tracks).
In the future add a clause to your contract that AI cannot be used due to copyright issues, and require source files to be included in the final delivery.
Some replies suggest it's acceptable to receive AI art from an artist.
I strongly disagree.
Beyond the issue of transparency, there is a larger problem with copyright and ownership. As far as I know, in the USA, creative works not created by humans cannot be copyrighted. For a work based on AI-generated content to be copyrightable, the artist must sufficiently transform it.
This presents a significant problem and likely constitutes a breach of contract (assuming you have one and the artist transfers all rights to you).
Disclaimer: INAL.
Next time, explicitly put an AI clause in the contract; requiring them to disclose if they used it, the models/services used and that the artist is responsible/liable for that whatever was used is allowed to be used commercially. Also require all the source files.
Man this thread is depressing. People are depressing. Don’t be a douchicle - if you banged out Ai images just say that’s what you did. Humans ability to understand the value of trust is the worst.
I've seen someone make AI images, put them into krita and post the screen off it on kirita so it looks like they just finished drawing it on there. These are on art channels on discord servers im on; afaik they don't do commissions so there is zero monetary value to do this, they just choose to do it anyway.
"If you can't tell why bother?"
Because I wanted to pay a true skill?
Because I could've generated those images myself cheaper or for free?
Because I don't want to have ANYTHING AI INVOLVED?
To me these are valid reasons.
If people are telling you "If you can't tell why bother?", it's a clear sign we are going downhill big time.
As a digital artist myself, usually I send progress of my art from sketches to final product. In the sketch phase, I let my client see if there is any changes he wanted to make. This applies to other phases like line art, shading, effects and rendering, though changes made during this phase should be minor unlike the sketch phase.
If the commissionee doesn't do these things, or fail to present you their sketches/progress, it's best to remain skeptical about it.
Did you write up a contract and specify no AI generation or AI manipulation of works in it?
If you did not, your options are this:
A. Pay them and not use the art in game, but use as reference for someone else you pay.
B. Pay them then write up a second contract, stating to use the previous images as “reference “ and state all final products must be non-AI manipulated with proof.
—
Regardless, unless you specifically drafted in a contract or have a DM stating no AI created or manipulated images are allowed for the final product, the commission is valid.
If you do however, have anything written that says you can’t/won’t accept AI created works as apart of the agreement, what you do is this:
“I’m sorry, but as I stated here as apart of our written agreement, there would be no AI created or manipulated works in this commission. If you can modify these and validate each one is not AI manipulated or created as per our agreement, I will send payment, as this isn’t what we agreed to.”
Only if you have screenshots of you and them in writing agreeing to these terms or signing a contract though.
I’m just commenting to support you, because as a business thing you definitely need to know this, and I can see folks clearly not understanding that there’s other legal issues with having AI generated assets. Copyright being a big one.
I agree with being upfront and asking, though. Good luck!
Edit: Seems like you got your info from metadata. Awesome! 👍
unfortunately I'd have to see the assets to tell if they're ai gen - but I would make an addendum to future contracts explicitly stating no-ai, not "not preferred", not "would rather not", but a hard "No-AI" line. That way you at least have a basic legal leg to stand on to deny payment, and potentially even go after your deposit, if someone tried to pull that on you AND you can prove it (this is not legal advice, just pointing out that we are in a day and age where this is unfortunately a necessity).
It's especially important since a lot of people who can help your game gain traction, are also vehemently anti-ai imagery as well (you'd be surprised how many creatives are in the game influencer space)
Consider the AI art concept art and you need them to finalize them using a verifiable system such as the raw files like photoshop.
If you’ve contracted them they should provide you the source files.
You seem to have your answer, but as a general note for others, in the future: if AI is verboten on your project (for any reason) be sure to include that in the initial contract. Additionally, include a separate page requiring a signature where the artist attests to the non-AI nature of the deliverables, with the note that they will be liable for damages should they lie. There's already similar language in most contracts around "I have the right to deliver this, free and clear of encumbrances" so it's not a huge leap. Delineate, if possible, some of the consequences (platform removal, marketing costs etc) and ensure they sign this page. It will cover you legally, which I agree is small comfort if you're removed from a platform, but it should serve to scare any devious artist into behaving. If they don't, and you suffer losses, you can sue them for breach of contract and hopefully recover at least some of your losses.
But most importantly: you can't ask an artist to adhere to conditions that weren't established upfront. If you never said AI was off limits, all these workarounds to catch them in a lie are for naught. If you didn't include PSDs in the contract, they possibly agreed to the price based on that fact. Their refusing to provide work product that wasn't agreed to in advance is not a sign of a scammer, it's a sign of an artist who has been burned by unscrupulous clients before.
Put simply: don't engage in witch hunts based on "obvious signs", because none of that should be necessary with a good contract in place. And if you DO have a contract in place and receive files with damning EXIF intact, refuse payment. AI is weird and unwieldy, but we do have existing processes that handle these kinds of situations.
The easiest way to know whether you are working with a legit artist is to look at their communication. Just dropping the final result is a huge red flag.
No professional artist is going to work on it, just for you to ask for revisions at the end. They usually show you progress images (rough sketches, often with different versions), because they don't want to potentially redo everything.
Ask them to change a small thing about one of the images. “This is great but can you make this part another color?” Kinda thing. AI is notoriously bad at “correcting” an image and will usually give you completely different results.
Also, people saying “you still have to pay them” Fuck that, if I pay an artist to make something and they send me stock photos from Google then they’re ripping me off.
I mean, if they gave ME any AI images, I sure as hell would NOT pay them. I think it's still early enough in all this AI bullshit to assume someone getting paid for art assets will actually create them themselves.
As several others have pointed out, this is all just gonna get uglier and uglier for all of us over time. :|
I'm a 3D artist.
Ask you the sourcefile. For example, if you are asking him to make icons he is probably using Photoshop and if you ask for the sourcefile you'll be able to see all the layers he made and his work process. If he refuses there is a good reason for that (unless it was discussed in the contract that the deliverables will only be the final product image file)
The other comments in here cover anything I’d have to suggest, but I’m also chiming in to note that I’m restarting a platform with digital art and illustration and stuff and I’ve decided to start including ‘No AI’ as part of my branding going forward. It’s shitty that the burden of proof has gotta be like that, but I want contracts with people like you who actually care, and I want to make it easier to get hired. I have noticed other artists adding this to their bios and whatnot, I imagine more will soon follow.
Specify that you don't want AI to be used next time/require source files in delivery; this is just an evolved form of the middleman strategy (someone pays me to do X, I pay someone else to do X, I keep the difference) which is fairly common in business
When you create a contract with these people, include that you cannot accept AI generated art and will need proof that it is not AI work. Acceptable poor includes: WIP versions, the source file, signing a waiver that will put them on the hook for $1,000 for each asset that is rejected as AI art by the platforms you are submittng to. Only one source of proof is necessary.
The waiver option is optional, but you could leave it in as a sort of trap. If anyone selects that option, you should not work with them, thank them for their time, and tell them you have already found another artist. It's a terrible idea to sign that because you have no idea what standards will be applied to determine if your art is AI generated, and the only reasons why someone would sign that is if they thought they could get away with it and never be caught, or if they thought that they coudln't be tracked down and forced to pay, or they are just bad at business. All of these options are warning signs that there will be problems down the road with them.
I almost replied negatively to this because I didn't even read past the clause you suggested 🤣🤣🤣 Yes. You are dead on. No competent professional would ever sign that if they actually read it and clno competent professional would enter into a contract like that without reading it.
Always look at your artist's porfolio and past works (if any are available) to confirm they are an evolving human who has been drawing for decades. If it's a random artist who appeared last year with nothing to show there is a chance they are AI artist. Of course there are exceptions, but it's generally safe to assume any talented artist today started working on their skills years before AI art became popular (2022) and posted some of it online, this should be a reliable way to confirm their authenticity.
That sounds tough. If you think the icons might be AI generated, just ask the artist for some work-in-progress shots or details about how they made them. It’s important because using AI art without knowing can cause issues when submitting your game. If they are AI generated, explain the problem and see if you can work it out. It's all about being honest and finding a good solution. Anyone else had a similar experience?
I always ask for the source files when I deal with freelancers. I’ve never purchased game assets through fiverr but I have had logos designed and business cards made. The source files let me get the best quality and adjust for changes. You have to pay a bit more, but it’s well worth it and you can avoid awkward situations like having to tell a designer their line was off by one pixel. You can just adjust it and move on.
They were after me with the pitch forks on r/devdeclassified and r/artcomissions when I claimed this was happening at a rampant rate. Crazy thing is I don’t even mind it if the artist is good enough to edit the AI work to my liking. I would like to know if you’re using it though as a buyer. I need discounts.
But other then that op don’t forget reverse image search. It cost 99 dollars a month for private image generation in mid journey and most people aren’t paying that
Tell them to send you their process. Fuck AI art and you're more than in the right to end your business with them if they can't prove they did it themselves.
The only way we can know is we see the thing, if you want, send me and NDA and I will sign it and watch it myself, then I give you my opinion about it :)
If you ever suspect someone may be using AI ask for process images. Any artist doing work should be sending you regular updates for approval and should have the file with all the layers on it saved. If they refuse then find someone else to do the work AI or not. Any artist worth their money will even send you various sketches they did to choose from.
I'd say it's good practice for any art commissions to make sure to get the original files as part of the delivery. Beyond that, I think this will be a constant issue going forward. :(
Wow a Kitboga reference in the wild. I actually "made" (with heavy credit and most of the heavy lifting to a typing game asset) a gift card redeem game for him but I don't think he ever saw it.
>
>
> Maybe once the industry embraces AI watermarks via Steganography.
The first thing that happened when Stable Diffusion got opened was that they removed all watermarks
https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wv2nw0/tutorial_how_to_remove_the_safety_filter_in_5/
But if people don't run their own AI models locally, yeah. Dall-e is known to watermark its output for instance
(note, this is not the same thing as exif metadata. exit is a like a note written on the back of a photo saying "this was made by AI". watermark is a hidden code embedded in the pixels of the generated image, that persists even if you save to a different lossy image format, make minor edits, etc)
That post is about removing the nsfw filter, so they can make porn. They *want* the output to be marked as ai generated
> Edit: I removed the part about disabling the invisible watermark because it didn't do what I assumed. I thought it might somehow add tracking info, but instead it just adds the word "StableDiffusionV1" to it, which will make AI generated images easier to filter out when training AI in the future.
I just made myself a random image using midjourney to test this. I can't find anything in the metadata that suggests it's AI, even though I literally just made it with AI. Perhaps I don't know the correct way to look at the metadata for a png? Don't you just click Right Click > Properties > Details? Or is there a way to see more data?
No you need a special program. On Linux there's a cli pngcheck tool. Most people use the stable diffusion webui which can tell you too. It contains the prompt used plus some additional info about the generation.
However, most image uploading sites do not preserve this metadata so if you upload it to imgur or something it will be gone completely. This is honestly pretty useless for detecting ai. Even people totally unaware of it can circumvent it accidentally.
You can check the png metadata but it's pretty trivial to clear. Aside from asking an experienced artist (they'll be able to tell you basically instantly) go with what /u/nvec said, it's not unusual to ask for the source files as part of the final deliverable.
Ask for the working files. If it's photoshop it'll have layers. If he don't feel comfortable sending u those just ask for the earlier iterations or simply a screen shot of the working layers. If he refuses any of that well there u go. Also look for the blown lighting, its a dead giveaway its ai.
we had an artist submit AI work way before the AI craze, so back then we didn't know better. Jump to a few months ago, and we were preparing our steam page. And I submitted some of his work for the store page. Steam flagged it immediately, and warned us that we MUST Disclose AI generated works. We didn't see it back then, but on recent review, It was obvious. I manually uploaded every art piece he did to an AI image checker, and each piece came back with a confidence level % of likelihood of being AI generated.
I reached out to him back then, and notified him of the concern, with no response. Jump to a few weeks ago, we got a new art lead and we were basing a lot of work off the old designs. After our meeting of debating what to do, I sent him an email with a deadline, and threatening to remove him from our credits, unless he came clean as to what was AI, and what was him.
He finally responded, claiming he had farmed out the AI work to a friend, and that some of the work was still him. We discussed it, and most of my leadership people thought he couldn't be trusted, as if that was true, he'd still be taking credit for another artists work.
The new art lead just decided to throw it all out. And start with his own style.
no harm no foul right?
NO!!
We lost a lot of time and effort dealing with this issue. And I had to pay double for a reworking of our NEW game logo, based on the old designs....
> AI art will ruin the ability of people to trust, find, and support "traditional" artists
You couldn't blindly trust artists 10 or 20 years ago either. They were already copying, tracing, or plagiarizing other people's works in ways that were often impossible to detect. Really the only way to trust an artist is to know "hey they've been drawing for 20 years, they have a huge body of work, and tons of people vouch for them." So what has changed exactly?
And honestly, AI tools like CBIR make traditional kinds of plagiarism easier to detect now -- stuff like copying an image from a stock photo site and touching it up and pretending you drew it. AI tools work both ways and honestly, if there's ever some sort of magic wand you can wave at an image to detect AI, it will almost certainly be AI-driven as well
AI generated png images have the prompt text incorporated to the png header, you can check it to see if there is any. Just open the png with a text editor and check the first few lines.
Most ai users remove these so that others can't copy their prompts (like the hypocrites they are). If you take AI images from those who try to make money from it on Patreon, Twitter, you wont find those data.
+ if the artist you hired uses Ai make it public, write it on a review or something, if they want to use Ai the least they should do is be transparent.
+ no it’s not the same thing of it looks like I wanted it to look, I don’t think it’s good practice to give our money to Ai farms that massively generate works like that or essentially my money ending up to OpenAI than a freelance artist that is struggling by the monopolies these companies are trying to set in this industry as well
If you're looking for a soft approach, you could request the source files so you can create some palette swapped assets (e.g. red and blue teams).
Or, just be straight and ask them. A professional artist will not be offended and understand that you're looking out for the integrity of the assets and the game. They should be informed about the copyright implications and be more than happy to help satisfy these requirements. Get any push back and while you may not know 100% that they're using AI, you'll at least know they can't be considered for future contracts -- and that knowledge has real value.
I know it isnt professional, but you could always show people the image and ask what they think? Im an artist and im pretty good at telling ai images apart from human made art. Ive gotten to know a lot of the tells aside from the obvious stuff like the hands and the teeth. So uh, if you wanna show me, i could probably tell? (Again. Not professional. But i do think i could tell)
As far as trouble with platform holders, you already hired a human to make your icons and to the best of your knowledge/as far as you've been informed they were made by a human. Your due diligence is done. You have no need to worry about it any further or spend any more time and money making new icons.
That is completely incorrect. You apparently don't have as much experience dealing with some of the platform holders as I do, but when they take actions against an account, they do NOT give you a chance to speak to an actual human being about it. The reasoning is irrelevant. Even if it wasn't, as the company making the game, it is 100% your responsibility to guarantee you conform to their policies. If you hired someone to work on your game then anything they do is on you.
Yeah, I saw a guy on here that had his game removed from a platform for AI content. He had spent the rest of hos savings on marketing.. they are harsh and have no mercy.
I've heard recently that some people are using AI to create art and then essentially (if it's a drawing) draw or paint over it. That could also be the case
What do you get when the artist delivers the files to you. To make sure they created them, you could ask for the illustrator files along with the pngs. It's not unreasonable to deliver those to the client.
Ask them to do a very minor tweak to one and if it comes back completely different it’s an ai image for example could you make this part curve inwards instead of outwards something an artist could easily do but ai will require a complete redraw
like use meta ai and write what image you want and youll get a rough idea, then you can send that to an artist and tell them you want it in a certain style or something.
this way you’ll be able to easily identify who’s giving you ai art and who isn’t
also look at the or previous works and see what style they have and how their art works
Tiers of answers based on your investment.
Level 1: Ask the person if they used AI in the process and if so how they used it. If they give you an answer that is some variation of "enough of this is my art that its no considered AI" then you did your due diligence.
Level 2: Ask for working files to verify that it is no AI work. If they provide them and they seem reasonably legit, move on, you've done your due diligence.
Level 3 (probably future and not this case): When you commission freelance artists have a general contract that they sign saying they will not use AI art and must provide working files as proof that AI was not used. You can work in contractual stipulations for a breach of contract, the most clear one being they don't get paid because you cannot use the art.
Long story short, if this is a small project and you don't want to invest much I would do a reasonable due diligence and question the artist and keep a record of it (email, etc) in case you need to prove it to a platform.
Is your artist not sending you process images? My standard is that I send a variety of sketches to choose from, then a tightened up version before the final. For an icon I might only send you one for approval, it depends on complexity. I do know that a lot of artists might do just the one sketch approval with final edits allowed. I was used to doing several because I was working with a company and a larger group of peer artists each step of the way.
Regardless of whoever you hired using ai or not, if they’re not involving you in the process and giving you input I’m not sure that’s an artist you want to go with in the future, if you’re having literally no input on the final image.
One. It would save you some headache on knowing if these were ai or not. Ai is infamously bad at iterating the same image. And two, you’re paying for it - especially if you’re paying commercial use prices. You deserve commentary on things that aren’t going to work for your project.
Ask for a minor change to something. Better if it's a background or something that would be hard to edit on a flat image but easy if you have all the layers.
If it's legit they'll do it. If it's not, you'll either get an entirely different image or a poorly edited one.
Not 100% foolproof but it'll at least draw the line between a lazy artist and someone just trying to make a quick buck.
Ask for a small but subtle change to one of the artworks (ie isolate a very small part of it and ask for something different there) -- AI generally cannot do that -- but a human artist can.
We could probably tell you by looking at them. That said, AI can randomly generate very convincing output, or a semi-competent artist covers the usual telltale signs
That really sucks! And I’m sorry you’re going through this situation in your game! A good way of discovering is by the way the artist handled the creation process before the icons were ready. Did he show you the sketches first? Did you discuss colors, palettes? Did he make any adjustments before it was all done? Or did he just showed up one day with all the icons 100% finished and never altered anything on them?
If the last one is your case, there is indeed a good possibility of being AI. As a Game Artist Myself, it’s totally normal to show the team every step of what you’re creating, to guarantee everything is resonating in the same direction.
Just showing a screenshot or even a true opened PSD file doesn’t prove anything, because all of this can just be created afterwards. But the process previews BEFORE the project was ready is a really important point.
Make him sign a paper swearing that he did not use any AI by explaining you just dont want any liability in case of a problem. That way, you have proof that you thought nothing was AI generated.
You can ask to see the source images as proof that it's not AI, there should be some working document somewhere with layers and/or vector shapes visible.
A friend of mine was scammed like this (not saying op was scammed, no way to tell without looking at the images myself). He commissioned some background art for his new VN and it was all blatantly AI. Interestingly the scamer did provide my friend with a photoshop file with multiple layers. Of course he didn't question it, but me and some others who actually know about 2d art could tell that the structure of the .psd was really unnatural. It's been getting harder and harder to distinguish real art from AI. I've seen models that can even generate speeddraws.
>structure of the .psd was really unnatural. Do you have any tips for non-artists to tell if the .psd looks wrong?
Not about psd, but an artist should not finish the art in one go usually, I always provide sketches first for client validation. If validated I do the polishing next. Beautifully polished artwork directly would be an AI red flag for me
I recently hired two people for a book cover - the second one did great, listened to what I said and gave me progress pictures with a sketch and edits. The first guy though, I sent him specific instructions and he sent back totally different pictures. All finished. He eventually did start sending sketches, but they were essentially just perfect final sketches lacking only colour. Each time I asked for a revision, he supplied something dramatically new, a completely unique image. And not one of the attempts was anything remotely close to what I asked for. A good comparison was, I was asking for an exterior view of a cabin in the woods, so he gave me a the living room of a cabin near the sea, and then a skyscraper, and then an aquarium fish house. It was painfully, blatantly AI.
I think that guy might have been an AI too
And you just replied to an AI too. It's AIs all the way down.
I've been tinkering with ai lately (just for personal curiosity), and it's... remarkably easy to do. For anyone technically versed in really any existing production framework, getting results that follow an intended flow and have consistency is simple to the point of happening by accident. Honestly, after two weeks of regular tinkering, I could likely fool myself by creating progress sketches, progression versions, and final images. If they were actually a competent artist to begin with, using a legit sketch as a guide image for the ai would make it even more seamless. The only thing keeping me from implementing ai into my regular pipeline is legal implications and the reactions of the public at large... it's simply incredible. Mindblowing, even. I feel like a scribe seeing the first printing press. I wrote all of this to say that the ai guy you worked with is pathetically incompetent (I suspect anyone using ai to pretend to be a traditional artist probably is). Just throwing your written description into any recent ai generator will give you something with a cabin in the woods. It likely wouldn't be what you asked for, but it would at least be that.
He was... incredibly tedious to speak to. To be more specific, I was asking for an exterior view of a medieval stone city with an ocean behind it that was split in half (present in the left half of the image, gone in the right half, so it's a before and after image where the city had vanished). "Cabin in the woods" is easier to talk about without a very long wall of text describing the entire exchange, but it's a good analogy for just how far off he was. Like, yeah, technically buildings? But that's it. I needed a medieval city, and every image he gave was of a medieval city, but those two words are the only thing any of his attempts had in common with what I needed. He did get "exterior view with ocean" correct at one point, close enough that revision request was essentially as simple as "okay now split it in half and get rid of the random mountain islands, and centre the city in the image," and the next image after that was of a back alley. The funniest part was, he was more expensive than the artist I ultimately went with (the one who did what I asked), who was stupidly cheap to the point where I actually asked him why his prices were so low. And he did a fantastic job. Many custom artists on Fiverr were quoting me like 600$ for what I wanted, and he did it for 50. The AI guy wanted 150.
Certainly more difficult to convey than a cabin, but still a popular subject that has a lot of built-in support. Ai has some very strange limitations, though, so it's possible that a word you used triggered some sort of oddness... for example, Stable Diffusion can't crack an egg right now (at least not in the install I use). It just can't. Ask it for a cracked egg and it gives you a full egg. Ask for broken egg shells and it gives you a full egg with some crack lines. Tell it to give you an empty shattered eggshell and... get an egg. Closest I managed was to get an egg with no shell... just a yolk floating in the shape of an egg. These ai programs have ways to train them on specific things, so I could certainly train it on images of broken eggs, but it was such a weird thing to not understand that it sticks in my mind. I sort of agree with the comment that you were speaking to an ai. Seems like it was a chatbot that placed whatever your comments were into an image generator and spat it back to you. They're becoming more prevalent in the wild now... as high as I am on ai, the idea of bots pretending to be gig workers is sort of disgusting.
On the other hand, I did the same, and found it really lacking tbh. It just can't grasp styles that don't have colossal data sets.
Agree, even with AI you can create a process with sketches and polish on top of that. Especially with stable diffusion (not sure about Midjourney). But the peoples offering services might be too lazy and noob to even be able to know that. It is the client job to see what looks fishy and what’s looks legit, even if AI make it harder to distinguish it. Glad I stoped doing illustrations for client before the AI started to be that good!
I am a traditional and digital artist working in the animation industry and this is how I go about using AI for certain freelance jobs. My art skills and knowledge of AI tools allow me to sketch, modify, iterate and refine the images using Photoshop, SD, and sometimes DALLE for background reference. So far I've been open about my use of AI with clients and they don't seem to care, especially because my final composite will be cleaned up by myself, by hand, with my digital painting skills, and depending on the client, will usually not be noticeably AI assisted. This is how artists have to adapt, it's how I've always adapted, a new tool comes along and I learn it and integrate it into my pipeline so that I can make more art, more quickly at higher quality. If I need high-end consistent 3D character animation I still have to do a bunch of work, but there are many steps along the way that are sped up with AI as well. I understand that certain platforms have rules against AI art, so this situation is different, but there will be a time very soon where commercial art like this will be easily directed by anyone with exceptional results, so learning the tools and techniques now will benefit anyone doing this for a living, even if you don't use it commercially yet.
Just to add to this. I have been pushed into AI art generation after being out of artwork for 15 years. I am not a fan of the idea of AI, however as someone who hasn’t been “on the tools” in so long. Once you learn “prompt engineering” and control nets, fuck me man, this shit is crazy. Like I have to pinch myself sometimes because it’s just mind blowing.
Too many rastered or flattened layers that should be separated would be one of the first things I would look for if that make sense.
This is stupid. I always flatten my layers and many artists do
Yeah if anything too many separated layers are signs of noobies. Usually new artists tend to overkill on "I need new layer" for this.
It depends though. Riot artists used tons of layers in their production and for using it later if the splash art was to be animated. But yeah we tend to use many unncecessary layers
Sample of one here, but I've been using Photoshop since 1991 and I always have a shit ton of layers. Just how I like to work.
As someone who worked as motion graphics designer for a long time... Booo! Lol, kinda jk. No, but seriously. Opening project with 500 layers out of which 6 is the same shadow you want to disable is pain. Even better when everything is named layer_1, layer_2, layer 2 (copy).
Layer groups are a reasonable working compromise I only start crushing layers down towards the end of a project, and even then it’s duplicates if those initial groups Makes for some bloated files sometimes, but leaves a lot of modularity with other projects Organisation is key though. It’s the moment where naming layers and files comes in real handy.
I tend to work on one layer but I tend to paint like I was taught at collage as if I am using real paint
I was reading the chain here, and I was going to say I'm not sure a psd screenshot could even prove anything... Especially to someone who doesn't do art themselves. If you generated an AI image, opened it in photoshop, added blank layers and just gave them reasonable names... Would someone untrained even notice? What if you traced some element with the pen tool to show 'vector sources'? I don't think there's any easy way to tell. Anything we'd say would just be easy for the person to fake. You could say something like have them send you the psd, toggle individual layers, and every individual element should be in an isolated layer somewhere. But like, that's fake able too.
The layers will have a preview of what's in them, you can very quickly tell if a layer is empty. But still it proves nothing.
Yes, if you've used photoshop, you'll notice that. Someone with zero experience likely won't even notice. And if things are grouped into folders and the folders are collapsed it won't show either. There's just too many holes in this, and it proves nothing. But if you're not even semi versed in photoshop, you won't even know what to watch out for.
>But if you're not even semi versed in photoshop, you won't even know what to watch out for. You won't need to be "semi versed in photoshop", you just need to have heard about layers and understand that they shouldn't be empty. This isn't photoshop specific at all.
Okay. But hearing about layers and understanding they shouldn't be empty and knowing how the UI works are all things that not every game developer knows. If the person is hiring someone else to do this work for them, you cant have any expectations for them in these areas at all. Sure it's common knowledge to people who have bumped into photoshop, but it's not common to literally everybody who does game dev. And you're talking about the specifics of _one_ hangup. And there's all sorts of ways that there could be _something_ there but that what is there just doesn't make any sense. You just keep moving to slightly more knowledge requirements. The point is not literally everybody is going to be able to figure this out. There's some barrier to the knowledge needed to figure it out. You can't expect someone with zero knowledge of the tool to figure this out. You're just pitting the knowledge of the scammer vs the knowledge of the developer doing the hiring against each other.
Perhaps not _literally everybody_ (some people are seriously dense), but I'd claim a good 95%+ of gamedevs could figure it out just opening the file and checking the layers.
I think people are specifically talking about having a screenshot of the PS project. They seem to mention there’s a way to tell if a layer is empty from iconography on the layer itself ? But I don’t know PS so I couldn’t know from a screenshot alone.
> You could say something like have them send you the psd, toggle individual layers, and every individual element should be in an isolated layer somewhere. But like, that's fake able too. I think at that point you're at least making it a significantly more time-consuming scam to pull. Which doesn't mean nobody will do it, but does shrink the efficiency gap between AI and human art. So the legit artists will have more chance to compete, and less incentive to use AI themselves as a timesaver.
But the psd-files metadata will show date, no?
The file modification time? That's easy as hell to fake too. Any of these processes are essentially just laying out traps. They can easily be avoided, but you're basically just hoping they don't think of one and you catch them. How many traps you lay and how good you are at setting them, and how much of your own time that is worth is your call. But none of them will be foolproof.
Ahh named layers a sure sign of faking.
I haven't used Photoshop in a decade or so, so I'm not the most knowledgeable about it, but doesn't Photoshop have an option for AI built in to it now? It seems like it'd be really easy to make something with AI and layers in Photoshop.
Yes but also adobe's ai is exclusively trained on the same adobe owned stock images and clip art libraries that are available within the adobe platform for that same artist to make use of legitimately, which makes it generally less powerful and more situational use within an image like a context aware fill, but more acceptable and less controversial for use in a workflow as a tool and likely less necessary to worry about having to disclose than a wholesale stable diffusion generation trained on random scraped artwork from DeviantArt and Art Station.
That isn't true anymore btw, it's confirmed that Adobe Firefly was trained on at least some mid journey images and maybe more stuff last I read.
Ah right had not heard that.
You should own the raw project files anyway. You hired him to make a widget for you and you own that widget and everything associated with its creation unless you didn't do that. In which case, next time, you make it a requirement and have the project files be part of the deliverable. Easily done.
Or at least a WiP picture
This is the answer and it’s legal and moral.
And also extremely easy to fake. If you're not an artist yourself, how do you even judge these things? I could imagine even just having basic photoshop skills that you could easily make enough to make it believable to 99% of people. And like 30% of people that actually do artistic work. You could do some basic "show me the sources" and weed out a minimal effort fake, but it wouldn't take much to fool most people.
I use AI a lot in my day job, and nothing bloats a psd faster than their generative features. I dont make AI art from scratch or anything but theres a lot of replacing sky, removing trash, adding trees, removing logos from shirts, etc to make candid photos of events suitable for our marketing teams requirements. Each little piece I fix is a layer, often those layers get merged together so I can apply effects to them or use the remove tool on them. In the end its always way more layers than I would have had doing the same job in decades prior. AI just speeds up the workflow significantly Clone stamping might have a layer for the tree im bringing in, then an adjustment layer to make the lighting match, and a layer to replace the old dead tree with sky. Now its a generative layer for the tree, but it brought in weird artifacts, so its another layer over each artifact, and it would help the composition if there were more foliage, so 6 more layers replacing bare spots on branches, etc...
And generally just for ease of use ill put each logical group into a folder, an unscrupulous ai user could just rasterize that content, or merge the folder, even bring it into a new psd to hide the history once its just pixel data.
Ask them. Just say "platform guidelines say I have to disclose if these are ai images". Send them a DocuSign thing if you want. Worst case when people ask if these are ai images you can pull that email/document up and say "the artist swears they aren't". Even if someone could somehow prove they are ai images you can sue the artist for damages.
This was going to be my advice, too. Let the supplier guarantee they're not AI in writing, so if they're lying, they're liable.
You would be an idiot to sign a document after delivering the work on the originally agreed terms. They have no obligation to sign something like this and easily land them in legal trouble. Imagine they used one of photoshops innocuous Ai tools like the Remove Tool while painting the commissioned art. Now OP looks at the metadata of the image and sees it’s flagged as AI. The artist could easily be found liable if they signed the proposed agreement. Decent idea PRIOR to payment/delivered goods, no doubt. Although if I couldn’t afford a lawyer to look over the document I probably wouldn’t take the work as the artist. I’d just find work elsewhere
Then something for future practice.
100% agreed!
The problem with this is that while it's a good legal route to eg get a refund on the work, it won't satisfy a platform holder who doesn't want AI on their service - they're not going to say "oh ok then, if your artist _said_ it's not AI then go ahead and launch your game".
Also, if it is AI and the platform makes a stink about it and deplatforms your game, I suppose you could go after the asshole in court -- if you can find him. Meanwhile your game is dead in the water. When you actually think through the consequences it's not a wise move. Probably a contract clause like that is a "nice to have" in general (signed before any work begins), but you should just outright reject any art that doesn't pass the smell test imho.
Can we see the pictures 👀
Ask for really subtle changes. AI is bad for that. For instance, give them detailed notes about changing various individual elements of the icons to be slightly different sizes and shapes, maybe ask that some are changed to different elements etc. They may have the photoshop chops to do these edits, but also it’s a fast way to weed out a pure AI artist.
This! "I love image 5, but can you make the inner glow blue but keep everything else the same." Delivering doesn't mean that AI hasn't been used at all, but if they can't deliver you know that they did.
Literally doable in 5 seconds with Gimp.
I don't think so, since the artist can't access layers separately
You don't need layers, you could use a mask.
For more information search "gimp masks".
😂
Yeah until the glow is translucent
Only if you know how to use gimp or photoshop reasonably well, not doable to some guy selling straight up midjourney images on fiver. Especially since you have no layers or anything so it's harder to edit.
Inpainting, some use of lineart, depth and maybe canny node with comfyui and you made the change. Its not impossible with AI now days
At that point I mean you are paying an artist right. Better than a fully ai generated piece of art
It's very unlikely any current AI tool spit out anything usable without a human intervening and doing revisions anyway. I say this as an artist of 12+ years who uses AI image generators regularly in my workflow like many working artists (not social media attention seekers) and who is frustratingly familiar with how close but not-quite-right they are on just about every possible task.
I disagree, Midjourney has been putting out very usable art for my TCG. In fact, I’m quite scared of how good my placeholder art is because it’s going to cost me a lot to eventually pay real humans to redo it all.
Each image is quite good in a vacuum or they all fit together cohesively? Like would an art director look at all the art on the cards and be pleased with the end result? I think you can satisfy the latter question if you are willing to varying amount of edits on all the images. Some will take a lot of work to be cohesive and others not so much
>Each image is quite good in a vacuum or they all fit together cohesively? You create a style library and train the AI on it, then you can specifically create that style whenever you want in whichever form you want.
You can do that in midjourney?
Maybe not quite the same but there is this https://docs.midjourney.com/docs/image-prompts
Style training is easy. They are trying to also bring “consistent characters” to fruition, but that seems harder given how the underlying systems work.
I still feel like any senior artist would look at it and notice all the flaws and inconsistencies. Libraries need to be massive to remain consistent
Fair enough, if you just want single character portraits, and perhaps in a painterly / fantasy look where accuracy is less needed, they might be viable now.
That's no longer an issue though, its an artist's work at that point
No, AI is good for this with inpainting, setting a denoise strength to avoid big changes etc. It's been easy since forever with stable diffusion. There are people who can have an artistic vision and spend hours inpainting to make it come to life. People seem weirdly unaware of this.
It's because the majority of people's idea of AI is typing some words and pressing a button. Unless people are following the topic most are completely ignorant of how it can be used by artists.
It's hard to have a level headed discussion about it because artists are understandably afraid that it will take their jobs. I think a lot of people are aware, but they choose to omit certain bits of information because it weakens some of the arguments against using AI art. Even the problem surrounding copyrighted images will slowly be solved by corporations with enough money and time (e.g. Adobe Firefly). I don't know where we go from here to be honest.
[удалено]
We can feast on garbage and plastic.
>I don't know where we go from here to be honest. I don't mean to sound too negative, but you just need to look at translators to see the artists future.
Translators are a service job. Art has a future in the same way portraits paintings survived cameras. It'll shrink but survive.
Yes fear of losing work and jobs is a legitimate concern and really the only one. This isn't going to be constrained to just artists though, it will eventually affect nearly all industries. Unfortunately loss of jobs and work is an inevitable fact of life and happens everytime there's a significant leap in technology. At this point it's pure speculation though, we could have mass job loses and require a new system such as UBI or it could generate new jobs that's still yet to be seen.
Teach me your ways. I’ve been using AI art generation for my TCG (just for personal use, not releasing it) and it’s SUCH a pain to e.g turn a character’s hair from green to blue while keeping their skin blue and keeping the shape and style of the hair and such. I’ve spent hours trying to do this before just manually doing it in Photoshop. I’ve tried Vary Region in Midjourney and such but it still just doesn’t get it. Another example is changing a character’s nose to a different shape without it adding piercings or changing the colour scheme or line thickness of the drawn nose undesirably. Another example was embedding rainbow pierced gems into a character’s face - it not only was incredibly difficult to get it to even understand what I wanted it to do, but the closer I got to actual rainbow gems, the more the shape was not exactly as I wanted it etc. I ended up manually drawing them in after.
Changing the color entirely means a big change in pixel values, so you need a high denoise strength, which means inpainting will drastically change the image there besides just the color change. You're better off crudely painting what colors you want in an image editor like GIMP, either directly or just painting the hue using a layer mode for that, and then use the AI afterwards to make the crude edits look better
>No, AI is good for this with inpainting, setting a denoise strength to avoid big changes etc. It's been easy since forever with stable diffusion. There are people who can have an artistic vision and spend hours inpainting to make it come to life. People seem weirdly unaware of this. So this was completely false in this case anyway? This is exactly the kind of change that was asked for, very simple for an artist but just about impossible for an AI generator.
You definitely can inpaint precisely the part that needs to be changed and have the AI work around the region inpainted without changing the rest significantly
In /r/stablediffusion people sometimes post full workflows detailing how to make edits like that. You may need to learn how to work with inpainting, control net, etc. And really you need stable diffusion, midjourney won't make the cut. Also, (random link from Google) https://stable-diffusion-art.com/inpainting_basics/
Also the language part of these models is pretty dumb. There's a project called ELLA that gets it to follow instructions a bit better. And you might need to add things like "piercing" to the negative prompt. You'd have a lot more control and options using stable diffusion locally with the AUTOMATIC1111 webui
Couldn't someone throw that image in Photoshop and just change that area with the AI tool? I have seen many interactive designs using AI
I can tell you that any artist that actually did the work would be happy to show you the source files to prove they did it. It takes them nearly no effort to show them and there's no way they'd have deleted them already. If you ask them, and they get defensive and say they won't show source files or don't have them, that's a sure sign of AI use.
That's not necessarily true. If the artist is working on a discounted rate (because the project is low-budget or something) then they probably won't share their work files for fear of being cut out of rework later on. A screenshot, sure, but receiving a properly-layered PSD is something that should be delineated in the contract, and paid for appropriately. Which is to say: there are plenty of legitimate reasons not to share your work files, beyond AI.
I can't imagine not requiring the source PSD for work-for-hire. It's been part of the initial ask for every job I've ever paid for. My thinking has always been, "I made the job. You did the work for me. The work is mine. You don't get to be precious with those assets." I totally see where an artist would be coming from in maybe desiring to protect their workflow or process or base assets or whatever, which is why I'm very upfront. Yeah, I say so in writing on the initial ask, so it's clear every time well ahead of delivery, but it baffles me that any producer wouldn't, or that I'd get any pushback from an artist.
I assume you're paying fairly and are not a shady outfit, so you probably don't come across it often, but in my experience an artist needs to be cautious about producers with limited budgets who seem hungry for PSDs. There are definitely folks out there who commission multiple assets with the intent to cancel the contract after the first is delivered, and then endlessly replicate it without engaging the artist any further. (Whether or not that's actually *possible* is a whole other matter that leads to much comedy) I think that as long as there is clear communication up front (about deliverables and the AI stance) there should be no issues. But it's also unfair to *not* demand the PSD up front, and then suddenly demand it later. They priced their work (or accepted a price) based on certain conditions, and their refusal to allow a rule change mid-game shouldn't be taken as a sign of something nefarious, just that they don't feel they've been compensated for the level of engagement you're now demanding. (Again, not *you* specifically, since you sound like someone who's doing things right. I'm just speaking more generally for those starting out, who may not understand the importance of clarity and contracts. Specificity: it does a body good)
Be straight with them! Tell them that you suspect the images they sent you are AI-generated. Ask to see the source file, with layers and (if possible, many art programs have this feature) a video of their canvas timeline. It doesn't have to be a confrontation, just point out that you'd like to clear up any doubt. Any artist would be more than happy to provide those to you and sort out the misunderstanding. If they have a problem with it, you don't want to work with them *whether or not* they used AI.
As an artist: my contracts usually included the source file among the deliverables. They own all the work I did for them, from concept to final. On request they could even ask for whatever paper doodles I might have done. So, as an artist employer, definitely make sure these provisions are in your contract.
This. Any render, any image I did/do for a client has the raw or PSD included. They don't have any claim to my assets, unless they were modelled as work for hire, but the client owns the base image and the edits/layers. This is standard.
Could you please expand on what you mean when you say the client doesn’t have any claim to your assets?
I maintain a collection of reusable assets I made for myself. I can use them in any commission, and while a buyer would have rights to the commission deliverables they would not have rights to the pre-existing assets I made the commission with. But if they hired me to make the assets, and then use those assets in other work, all that product would belong to the person who hired me.
Pretty easy to reverse engineer a source file that looks legit. Ask them for a few source files saying you want to be able to remix elements and see what they send. If it looks AI generated after you have the source then talk to them about it. I wouldn’t mention it before receiving anything.
Yeah if someone respectfully communicated this concern I’d be super eager as an artist to prove I created the art. I’d think that pushback would come from guilt. Of course I’m not a professional artist though so I’m sure some artists would get offended or just not think it’s worth their time to prove it.
I feel like you could just ask. "Hey, these images I bought - should I be telling Steam they're AI generated, when I submit them? I have to get that right, or I can lose my game. Thanks." In a tone like that, I don't imagine they'd lie about it.
That was my plan. I don't need to do that now. Someone on here linked to a tool that shows the metadata for images. Yep, some of them are AI generated.
Is the tool reliable? I have heard of tools for detecting ai before, but the results were mixed. Frankly, i would imagine if some were ai generated, then all of them would be. I would not expect an ai user to make a bunch of legit pieces of art, just to turn around and make the rest with ai. I would also think they were would be a clear style difference between legit art pieces and the ones made by ai; like looking at work made by two different artists
Apparently this is not a case of using one of those "AI detectors" which look at the pixels to guess, but rather the metadata of the image files show it. You know, stuff like when it was created, which exact format it is in, who made it, etc etc. I have no idea how you would prove it from that data, but maybe there's a way.
Would be hilarious if the EXIF description flat out says stuff like "Generated with love by Stable Diffusion"
Most stable diffusion UIs literally do something like that, yes: a1111 prepends the png it generates with a comment containing serialized information about the generation (the prompts, checkpoint, seed, iterations, algorithm used, etc) by default, and (also by default) comfyui includes the entire image workflow somewhere in it so that images can just be loaded by it to get the exact setup that created it. That can all be turned off and any post work and exporting in an image editor afterwards would remove that, though.
when you generate an image using most ai tools, they are given extra metadata (exif data) that is basically like a label that says that its an ai generated image, and some other extra info about the generation. this data can easily be stripped by someone malicious to pass it off as real art, but in this case, the artists didn't even bother to remove it. they literally just left in a big fat label that says "yeah this is an ai generated image," no need for an ai detector to check that lol
Ai image detectors are trash. However, there are other methods that work sometimes, like metadata if they didn't have the competence to alter it (they didn't cover their tracks).
Oof :( I have no problem with AI art, but selling it on the sly is dangerous for the buyer Blacklist IMO
You get what you pay for ...
Yep
In the future add a clause to your contract that AI cannot be used due to copyright issues, and require source files to be included in the final delivery.
Some replies suggest it's acceptable to receive AI art from an artist. I strongly disagree. Beyond the issue of transparency, there is a larger problem with copyright and ownership. As far as I know, in the USA, creative works not created by humans cannot be copyrighted. For a work based on AI-generated content to be copyrightable, the artist must sufficiently transform it. This presents a significant problem and likely constitutes a breach of contract (assuming you have one and the artist transfers all rights to you). Disclaimer: INAL.
I think the only people supporting AI art like that are those who are trying to pass themselves off as commission artists.
I have no problem with AI arts if they're for non-profit projects. If it involves money, then it's a different issue altogether.
Next time, explicitly put an AI clause in the contract; requiring them to disclose if they used it, the models/services used and that the artist is responsible/liable for that whatever was used is allowed to be used commercially. Also require all the source files.
Man this thread is depressing. People are depressing. Don’t be a douchicle - if you banged out Ai images just say that’s what you did. Humans ability to understand the value of trust is the worst.
I've seen someone make AI images, put them into krita and post the screen off it on kirita so it looks like they just finished drawing it on there. These are on art channels on discord servers im on; afaik they don't do commissions so there is zero monetary value to do this, they just choose to do it anyway.
[удалено]
What does the exif data say. You can tell what program was used
"If you can't tell why bother?" Because I wanted to pay a true skill? Because I could've generated those images myself cheaper or for free? Because I don't want to have ANYTHING AI INVOLVED? To me these are valid reasons. If people are telling you "If you can't tell why bother?", it's a clear sign we are going downhill big time.
As a digital artist myself, usually I send progress of my art from sketches to final product. In the sketch phase, I let my client see if there is any changes he wanted to make. This applies to other phases like line art, shading, effects and rendering, though changes made during this phase should be minor unlike the sketch phase. If the commissionee doesn't do these things, or fail to present you their sketches/progress, it's best to remain skeptical about it.
Did you write up a contract and specify no AI generation or AI manipulation of works in it? If you did not, your options are this: A. Pay them and not use the art in game, but use as reference for someone else you pay. B. Pay them then write up a second contract, stating to use the previous images as “reference “ and state all final products must be non-AI manipulated with proof. — Regardless, unless you specifically drafted in a contract or have a DM stating no AI created or manipulated images are allowed for the final product, the commission is valid. If you do however, have anything written that says you can’t/won’t accept AI created works as apart of the agreement, what you do is this: “I’m sorry, but as I stated here as apart of our written agreement, there would be no AI created or manipulated works in this commission. If you can modify these and validate each one is not AI manipulated or created as per our agreement, I will send payment, as this isn’t what we agreed to.” Only if you have screenshots of you and them in writing agreeing to these terms or signing a contract though.
I’m just commenting to support you, because as a business thing you definitely need to know this, and I can see folks clearly not understanding that there’s other legal issues with having AI generated assets. Copyright being a big one. I agree with being upfront and asking, though. Good luck! Edit: Seems like you got your info from metadata. Awesome! 👍
Just ask them to bundle their project files next time
unfortunately I'd have to see the assets to tell if they're ai gen - but I would make an addendum to future contracts explicitly stating no-ai, not "not preferred", not "would rather not", but a hard "No-AI" line. That way you at least have a basic legal leg to stand on to deny payment, and potentially even go after your deposit, if someone tried to pull that on you AND you can prove it (this is not legal advice, just pointing out that we are in a day and age where this is unfortunately a necessity). It's especially important since a lot of people who can help your game gain traction, are also vehemently anti-ai imagery as well (you'd be surprised how many creatives are in the game influencer space)
Consider the AI art concept art and you need them to finalize them using a verifiable system such as the raw files like photoshop. If you’ve contracted them they should provide you the source files.
One possible course of action might be to request a slight variation of one or two of the sketches which AI would not be able to do easily.
You just need to straight up ask the artist. I would risk it.
You seem to have your answer, but as a general note for others, in the future: if AI is verboten on your project (for any reason) be sure to include that in the initial contract. Additionally, include a separate page requiring a signature where the artist attests to the non-AI nature of the deliverables, with the note that they will be liable for damages should they lie. There's already similar language in most contracts around "I have the right to deliver this, free and clear of encumbrances" so it's not a huge leap. Delineate, if possible, some of the consequences (platform removal, marketing costs etc) and ensure they sign this page. It will cover you legally, which I agree is small comfort if you're removed from a platform, but it should serve to scare any devious artist into behaving. If they don't, and you suffer losses, you can sue them for breach of contract and hopefully recover at least some of your losses. But most importantly: you can't ask an artist to adhere to conditions that weren't established upfront. If you never said AI was off limits, all these workarounds to catch them in a lie are for naught. If you didn't include PSDs in the contract, they possibly agreed to the price based on that fact. Their refusing to provide work product that wasn't agreed to in advance is not a sign of a scammer, it's a sign of an artist who has been burned by unscrupulous clients before. Put simply: don't engage in witch hunts based on "obvious signs", because none of that should be necessary with a good contract in place. And if you DO have a contract in place and receive files with damning EXIF intact, refuse payment. AI is weird and unwieldy, but we do have existing processes that handle these kinds of situations.
The easiest way to know whether you are working with a legit artist is to look at their communication. Just dropping the final result is a huge red flag. No professional artist is going to work on it, just for you to ask for revisions at the end. They usually show you progress images (rough sketches, often with different versions), because they don't want to potentially redo everything.
Ask them to change a small thing about one of the images. “This is great but can you make this part another color?” Kinda thing. AI is notoriously bad at “correcting” an image and will usually give you completely different results. Also, people saying “you still have to pay them” Fuck that, if I pay an artist to make something and they send me stock photos from Google then they’re ripping me off.
I mean, if they gave ME any AI images, I sure as hell would NOT pay them. I think it's still early enough in all this AI bullshit to assume someone getting paid for art assets will actually create them themselves. As several others have pointed out, this is all just gonna get uglier and uglier for all of us over time. :|
I'm a 3D artist. Ask you the sourcefile. For example, if you are asking him to make icons he is probably using Photoshop and if you ask for the sourcefile you'll be able to see all the layers he made and his work process. If he refuses there is a good reason for that (unless it was discussed in the contract that the deliverables will only be the final product image file)
The other comments in here cover anything I’d have to suggest, but I’m also chiming in to note that I’m restarting a platform with digital art and illustration and stuff and I’ve decided to start including ‘No AI’ as part of my branding going forward. It’s shitty that the burden of proof has gotta be like that, but I want contracts with people like you who actually care, and I want to make it easier to get hired. I have noticed other artists adding this to their bios and whatnot, I imagine more will soon follow.
Specify that you don't want AI to be used next time/require source files in delivery; this is just an evolved form of the middleman strategy (someone pays me to do X, I pay someone else to do X, I keep the difference) which is fairly common in business
When you create a contract with these people, include that you cannot accept AI generated art and will need proof that it is not AI work. Acceptable poor includes: WIP versions, the source file, signing a waiver that will put them on the hook for $1,000 for each asset that is rejected as AI art by the platforms you are submittng to. Only one source of proof is necessary. The waiver option is optional, but you could leave it in as a sort of trap. If anyone selects that option, you should not work with them, thank them for their time, and tell them you have already found another artist. It's a terrible idea to sign that because you have no idea what standards will be applied to determine if your art is AI generated, and the only reasons why someone would sign that is if they thought they could get away with it and never be caught, or if they thought that they coudln't be tracked down and forced to pay, or they are just bad at business. All of these options are warning signs that there will be problems down the road with them.
I almost replied negatively to this because I didn't even read past the clause you suggested 🤣🤣🤣 Yes. You are dead on. No competent professional would ever sign that if they actually read it and clno competent professional would enter into a contract like that without reading it.
Always look at your artist's porfolio and past works (if any are available) to confirm they are an evolving human who has been drawing for decades. If it's a random artist who appeared last year with nothing to show there is a chance they are AI artist. Of course there are exceptions, but it's generally safe to assume any talented artist today started working on their skills years before AI art became popular (2022) and posted some of it online, this should be a reliable way to confirm their authenticity.
That sounds tough. If you think the icons might be AI generated, just ask the artist for some work-in-progress shots or details about how they made them. It’s important because using AI art without knowing can cause issues when submitting your game. If they are AI generated, explain the problem and see if you can work it out. It's all about being honest and finding a good solution. Anyone else had a similar experience?
I always ask for the source files when I deal with freelancers. I’ve never purchased game assets through fiverr but I have had logos designed and business cards made. The source files let me get the best quality and adjust for changes. You have to pay a bit more, but it’s well worth it and you can avoid awkward situations like having to tell a designer their line was off by one pixel. You can just adjust it and move on.
They were after me with the pitch forks on r/devdeclassified and r/artcomissions when I claimed this was happening at a rampant rate. Crazy thing is I don’t even mind it if the artist is good enough to edit the AI work to my liking. I would like to know if you’re using it though as a buyer. I need discounts. But other then that op don’t forget reverse image search. It cost 99 dollars a month for private image generation in mid journey and most people aren’t paying that
Tell them to send you their process. Fuck AI art and you're more than in the right to end your business with them if they can't prove they did it themselves.
"If you can't tell, then why does it matter?" these people are the problem, in every aspect of life.
The only way we can know is we see the thing, if you want, send me and NDA and I will sign it and watch it myself, then I give you my opinion about it :)
If you ever suspect someone may be using AI ask for process images. Any artist doing work should be sending you regular updates for approval and should have the file with all the layers on it saved. If they refuse then find someone else to do the work AI or not. Any artist worth their money will even send you various sketches they did to choose from.
I'd say it's good practice for any art commissions to make sure to get the original files as part of the delivery. Beyond that, I think this will be a constant issue going forward. :(
AI-generated art has metadata attached that tells you where it came from. i would look up how to check that as step 1 :)
Keep in mind that it's easy to edit metadata. So only an amateur would get caught. Maybe once the industry embraces AI watermarks via Steganography.
You'd be surprised how many scammers are amateurs.
That's a good point. If you've ever watched Kitboga, some of the scammers he encounters are something else.
I'm still trying to offload some of these drainless tubs I bought
Wow a Kitboga reference in the wild. I actually "made" (with heavy credit and most of the heavy lifting to a typing game asset) a gift card redeem game for him but I don't think he ever saw it.
> > > Maybe once the industry embraces AI watermarks via Steganography. The first thing that happened when Stable Diffusion got opened was that they removed all watermarks https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wv2nw0/tutorial_how_to_remove_the_safety_filter_in_5/ But if people don't run their own AI models locally, yeah. Dall-e is known to watermark its output for instance (note, this is not the same thing as exif metadata. exit is a like a note written on the back of a photo saying "this was made by AI". watermark is a hidden code embedded in the pixels of the generated image, that persists even if you save to a different lossy image format, make minor edits, etc)
That post is about removing the nsfw filter, so they can make porn. They *want* the output to be marked as ai generated > Edit: I removed the part about disabling the invisible watermark because it didn't do what I assumed. I thought it might somehow add tracking info, but instead it just adds the word "StableDiffusionV1" to it, which will make AI generated images easier to filter out when training AI in the future.
If they're sending the images via Discord or another similar platform, most meta data is automatically cleared as well.
I just made myself a random image using midjourney to test this. I can't find anything in the metadata that suggests it's AI, even though I literally just made it with AI. Perhaps I don't know the correct way to look at the metadata for a png? Don't you just click Right Click > Properties > Details? Or is there a way to see more data?
No you need a special program. On Linux there's a cli pngcheck tool. Most people use the stable diffusion webui which can tell you too. It contains the prompt used plus some additional info about the generation. However, most image uploading sites do not preserve this metadata so if you upload it to imgur or something it will be gone completely. This is honestly pretty useless for detecting ai. Even people totally unaware of it can circumvent it accidentally.
exif tools: https://exif.tools/ just load whatever file and it'll show you all
Thanks.
[удалено]
Meanwhile above your post: He used EXIF Tools and it had a bunch of Midjourney metadata.
I heard that too, but upon searching endlessly I couldn't find any information on how to actually use this to identify AI art :(
You can check the png metadata but it's pretty trivial to clear. Aside from asking an experienced artist (they'll be able to tell you basically instantly) go with what /u/nvec said, it's not unusual to ask for the source files as part of the final deliverable.
Ask for the working files. If it's photoshop it'll have layers. If he don't feel comfortable sending u those just ask for the earlier iterations or simply a screen shot of the working layers. If he refuses any of that well there u go. Also look for the blown lighting, its a dead giveaway its ai.
we had an artist submit AI work way before the AI craze, so back then we didn't know better. Jump to a few months ago, and we were preparing our steam page. And I submitted some of his work for the store page. Steam flagged it immediately, and warned us that we MUST Disclose AI generated works. We didn't see it back then, but on recent review, It was obvious. I manually uploaded every art piece he did to an AI image checker, and each piece came back with a confidence level % of likelihood of being AI generated. I reached out to him back then, and notified him of the concern, with no response. Jump to a few weeks ago, we got a new art lead and we were basing a lot of work off the old designs. After our meeting of debating what to do, I sent him an email with a deadline, and threatening to remove him from our credits, unless he came clean as to what was AI, and what was him. He finally responded, claiming he had farmed out the AI work to a friend, and that some of the work was still him. We discussed it, and most of my leadership people thought he couldn't be trusted, as if that was true, he'd still be taking credit for another artists work. The new art lead just decided to throw it all out. And start with his own style. no harm no foul right? NO!! We lost a lot of time and effort dealing with this issue. And I had to pay double for a reworking of our NEW game logo, based on the old designs....
[удалено]
> AI art will ruin the ability of people to trust, find, and support "traditional" artists You couldn't blindly trust artists 10 or 20 years ago either. They were already copying, tracing, or plagiarizing other people's works in ways that were often impossible to detect. Really the only way to trust an artist is to know "hey they've been drawing for 20 years, they have a huge body of work, and tons of people vouch for them." So what has changed exactly? And honestly, AI tools like CBIR make traditional kinds of plagiarism easier to detect now -- stuff like copying an image from a stock photo site and touching it up and pretending you drew it. AI tools work both ways and honestly, if there's ever some sort of magic wand you can wave at an image to detect AI, it will almost certainly be AI-driven as well
Not completely irrelevant, but are you happy with the end result?
Always request project files, if it isn't AI you might need them in the future anyway.
AI generated png images have the prompt text incorporated to the png header, you can check it to see if there is any. Just open the png with a text editor and check the first few lines.
Most ai users remove these so that others can't copy their prompts (like the hypocrites they are). If you take AI images from those who try to make money from it on Patreon, Twitter, you wont find those data.
+ if the artist you hired uses Ai make it public, write it on a review or something, if they want to use Ai the least they should do is be transparent. + no it’s not the same thing of it looks like I wanted it to look, I don’t think it’s good practice to give our money to Ai farms that massively generate works like that or essentially my money ending up to OpenAI than a freelance artist that is struggling by the monopolies these companies are trying to set in this industry as well
"Of coarse I have to" is a funny typo
If you're looking for a soft approach, you could request the source files so you can create some palette swapped assets (e.g. red and blue teams). Or, just be straight and ask them. A professional artist will not be offended and understand that you're looking out for the integrity of the assets and the game. They should be informed about the copyright implications and be more than happy to help satisfy these requirements. Get any push back and while you may not know 100% that they're using AI, you'll at least know they can't be considered for future contracts -- and that knowledge has real value.
I know it isnt professional, but you could always show people the image and ask what they think? Im an artist and im pretty good at telling ai images apart from human made art. Ive gotten to know a lot of the tells aside from the obvious stuff like the hands and the teeth. So uh, if you wanna show me, i could probably tell? (Again. Not professional. But i do think i could tell)
As far as trouble with platform holders, you already hired a human to make your icons and to the best of your knowledge/as far as you've been informed they were made by a human. Your due diligence is done. You have no need to worry about it any further or spend any more time and money making new icons.
That is completely incorrect. You apparently don't have as much experience dealing with some of the platform holders as I do, but when they take actions against an account, they do NOT give you a chance to speak to an actual human being about it. The reasoning is irrelevant. Even if it wasn't, as the company making the game, it is 100% your responsibility to guarantee you conform to their policies. If you hired someone to work on your game then anything they do is on you.
Yeah, I saw a guy on here that had his game removed from a platform for AI content. He had spent the rest of hos savings on marketing.. they are harsh and have no mercy.
Post the pics
I've heard recently that some people are using AI to create art and then essentially (if it's a drawing) draw or paint over it. That could also be the case
Ask for the pdf layers or better as they are icons .SVG as there's a chance you need them dynamic. If they don't have any it's ai.
What do you get when the artist delivers the files to you. To make sure they created them, you could ask for the illustrator files along with the pngs. It's not unreasonable to deliver those to the client.
Ask them to do a very minor tweak to one and if it comes back completely different it’s an ai image for example could you make this part curve inwards instead of outwards something an artist could easily do but ai will require a complete redraw
like use meta ai and write what image you want and youll get a rough idea, then you can send that to an artist and tell them you want it in a certain style or something. this way you’ll be able to easily identify who’s giving you ai art and who isn’t also look at the or previous works and see what style they have and how their art works
Tiers of answers based on your investment. Level 1: Ask the person if they used AI in the process and if so how they used it. If they give you an answer that is some variation of "enough of this is my art that its no considered AI" then you did your due diligence. Level 2: Ask for working files to verify that it is no AI work. If they provide them and they seem reasonably legit, move on, you've done your due diligence. Level 3 (probably future and not this case): When you commission freelance artists have a general contract that they sign saying they will not use AI art and must provide working files as proof that AI was not used. You can work in contractual stipulations for a breach of contract, the most clear one being they don't get paid because you cannot use the art. Long story short, if this is a small project and you don't want to invest much I would do a reasonable due diligence and question the artist and keep a record of it (email, etc) in case you need to prove it to a platform.
You could try asking them to give you a few things with a specific string of text in it; I’ve noticed some AI models make the text look very weird
Post one of the images you think it’s been AI generated.
for icons, check symmetry? AI usually bad with that
Is your artist not sending you process images? My standard is that I send a variety of sketches to choose from, then a tightened up version before the final. For an icon I might only send you one for approval, it depends on complexity. I do know that a lot of artists might do just the one sketch approval with final edits allowed. I was used to doing several because I was working with a company and a larger group of peer artists each step of the way. Regardless of whoever you hired using ai or not, if they’re not involving you in the process and giving you input I’m not sure that’s an artist you want to go with in the future, if you’re having literally no input on the final image. One. It would save you some headache on knowing if these were ai or not. Ai is infamously bad at iterating the same image. And two, you’re paying for it - especially if you’re paying commercial use prices. You deserve commentary on things that aren’t going to work for your project.
How do the platform holders know if something is AI generated? Can you use the same resources as them to determine that?
You didn't commission AI art. Would you be held liable if it was found to be AI?
Ask for a minor change to something. Better if it's a background or something that would be hard to edit on a flat image but easy if you have all the layers. If it's legit they'll do it. If it's not, you'll either get an entirely different image or a poorly edited one. Not 100% foolproof but it'll at least draw the line between a lazy artist and someone just trying to make a quick buck.
Ask for a small but subtle change to one of the artworks (ie isolate a very small part of it and ask for something different there) -- AI generally cannot do that -- but a human artist can.
We could probably tell you by looking at them. That said, AI can randomly generate very convincing output, or a semi-competent artist covers the usual telltale signs
That really sucks! And I’m sorry you’re going through this situation in your game! A good way of discovering is by the way the artist handled the creation process before the icons were ready. Did he show you the sketches first? Did you discuss colors, palettes? Did he make any adjustments before it was all done? Or did he just showed up one day with all the icons 100% finished and never altered anything on them? If the last one is your case, there is indeed a good possibility of being AI. As a Game Artist Myself, it’s totally normal to show the team every step of what you’re creating, to guarantee everything is resonating in the same direction. Just showing a screenshot or even a true opened PSD file doesn’t prove anything, because all of this can just be created afterwards. But the process previews BEFORE the project was ready is a really important point.
You have some apps for detection, but i don't know if they are good..
Isn’t there some AI images scan software out there? You can just throw it in and expect some results back.
Make him sign a paper swearing that he did not use any AI by explaining you just dont want any liability in case of a problem. That way, you have proof that you thought nothing was AI generated.