They do actually. Not defending Meta but they can recognize if a logo, pic, or video is AI. However, if you made a graphic like a collage or something then they sometimes don't recognize it.
There was an uproar on Instagram a few months ago because it tagged posts who used background removal as AI even though that thing has been around before AI, AI just made it faster.
It will never stop aggravating me that phone manufacturers crammed them with mandatory AI image enhancement to make up for cheaping out on the cameras. So much detail is lost and any time your picture includes text or numbers it makes the whole picture look fake and AI generated.
A lot of the features in Lightroom that they now call 'AI' are features I've been using for years since before AI was a big thing. They've just repackaged it as AI. It's the same as these 'AI powered' fridges nowadays
The watermark is useful, but platforms would need a fallback for screenshots and stripped metadata too. Otherwise the label only works when the uploader leaves the breadcrumbs intact.
The top 2 is a real thing, I remember getting the shitty dark green army men in the 90s and being super disappointed with how shit they are compared with the light green ones but it made a different faction for my old ones to fight against so not all bad
I thought this was real, and the reason is personal experience with toy cars, which are less detailed, non-transparent windows, more plastic and fewer components "on average" in the ones from my dads box of cars compared to the ones my kid has.
Honestly yeah I remember as a kid I had a bucket of these army men, half were my dad's from his childhood and were all WW2 styles, half were from the 90s and were Vietnam styled. Definitely noticeable difference in quality to me between the two armies, noticable even as a kid.
That doesn't preclude differences in brand or anything, but kids toys have been getting enshittified for a lot longer than other stuff
It being made in 1968 (if that's real, that is), makes me think about how maybe it was originally designed to resemble an M1 or M14, but got a last-minute change to the AR-15 front sight because that was such a standout from the old design.
Oh idk, because the exact same phenomenon is real when it comes to hotwheels cars? People keep "falling for this" because it's believable. I don't know what to tell you guys, but there's really nothing about that picture that screams "FAKE! AI AI AI!!!"
Please point out the part about it that is "very obviously fake," because I would say it's not obvious. And if your answer hinges on knowing for a fact that the toys from the 60s were not that detailed, then that's not obvious as I am not 70 years old.
Does it really matter tho? The price of single car has stayed the same for over 20 years. And I doubt many kids are going to care. They just want to play with their cars, not stare at the bottom all day.
I buy more Hot Wheels than a normal adult should (impulse buy because they are ~$1.25 after tax) and the vast majority of the ones I've bought in the last few years that are based on real world cars/movie cars have detailed bottoms. I'd say all, as I genuinely don't remember any not being detailed on the bottom, but it's possible there is 1 or 2 that didn't.
Hell, I have old castings from the 90s with like zero undercarriage detail! Ironically removing detail would cost more since that would be a brand new mold.
Yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Again, I am not defending the AI, but I think it's pretty dumb to ask "why do people fall for this" when I can so easily bring up another example of the exact same phenomenon that is real.
Be mad at whoever made it, but there's no need to be shitty to people who fall for it when it's pretty mundane and believable like this post is.
It could be very well true. (EDIT: I know this specific one is not true, but the point is different)
And I am pretty sure you can find on Alibaba or some similar chinese site tons of products, which are terrible quality.
The thing is, that today you have options in different price ranges.
You can buy a pan for 10USD. You can buy pan for 100s USD.
But you cant expect 10USD pan to be same quality as a pan, that costed 10USD 50 years ago.
Same thing with these soldiers. If you buy 3D printed plastic knockoffs from cheap plastic from China, you cant expect it to be same quality as those before.
Yeah, I guess you can't expect everyone to know about production processes.
3D printing is a very expensive method per unit. It makes sense if you are going to be producing a few units.
Those cheapo toys are injection molded. But hold up, expensive toys (like those Warhammer figures, or Lego) are also injection molded. The difference is poorer quality molds, poorer quality plastic, poor design choices, using molds after they have gone through wear and tear, poor quality control after production.
In the case of those army men its either getting their hands on ancient worn out moulds, or taking a selection of existing plastic army men and using them to make new moulds as cheaply as possible.
Making injection moulds is a very big up front cost.
I feel like a modern problem is, that you where able to decide if you buy a 10$ or 100$ pan years ago and had a quality that fits the price. Now you decide if you want to buy a 1$ pan, a 10$ pan or the same 10$ pan for 100$
I remember watching a video a while back with this same conclusion. They were testing tools from the 70s and tools today. They looked at a crescent wrench from back then and 2 from today. I cant remember the exact numbers but essentially they had one back in the day and it was $20. Now they have 2 options the $20 one and the $100 wrench. The $20 one was obviously shitty and had a big margin of error as well as slippage where as the $100 one was actually better than the old one. It was the same story for all of the tools they tested. The thing is tools used to be way more expensive back in the day because that old $20 wrench would cost the equivalent of $160 in today's money. It is absolutely true that quality is dropping for many things but for many other things they've just added in a bare minimum cheap option and people compare that to the old thing rather than comparing the expensive one.
In mind of the people something that costed 30 years ago 20 bucks should still cost 20 bucks.
They find 20 bucks cheap version and they complain about quality.
I went for a hike. Nothing crazy. Forgot my tent. Got one for 30 bucks, was perfectly fine. Probably will detiorate very fast, but that is kinda expected.
Making a decent mono-colored toy that's solid plastic is really easy and cheap. There is no reason for bad plastic toys to exist. And back in the day it made no sense to sell cheap knock-off because the originals were inexpensive.
To be fair, making a mold for a detailed figure costs money, I can see a high price for niche collector items. But a big part of the high costs is that factories have moved to overkill solutions for making plastic toys, That's because many factories have removed human designers and operators.
(3D printing for large volumes is fat more expensive by the way.)
There are real examples however, just look at the underside of matchbox cars over the years, they get less detailed as it goes on.
EDIT: I might be wrong on this, I do actually go to vintage toys fairs and boot sales and thought I was seeing a pattern but to honest I don't collect them and therefore don't know enough to say for sure that all the new lines are less detailed, so will admit I could be wrong.
The matchbox/hotwheels example is just as fake... i used to collect them and its just casting specific. Even new cars/molds features bottom details. Some older ones barely any. Also many new cars, especially EVs are simply more flat on the bottom
This has been discussed before. For the most part, they're still replicating what the undersides look like. Which nowadays is flat, because it's more aerodynamic.
Then use those examples with real pictures! It's like making up Trump shit. You don't have to! There's plenty of shit to be mad about no need to invent things!
Even if that post is fake, you do agree the concept of "enshittification" is real and exists across different products and services in the current age right?
Is this actually an example of enshittification though? because I always just figured that is specifically with one company over overtime making their product shittier I’d imagine these are all different companies that have made this over the years.
Yeah you can? OpenAI and Gemini models all have a SynthID watermark because companies agreed to put it there, so you can just go to the site and check if the image contains it.
You're conflating two different things. The generic "AI detectors" are what are garbage and misreport all the time.
That's not what this is. Anything made by the main modern AI models like ChatGPT have a hidden design in them which can be read back by their own identification system (SynthID). These ARE 100% accurate as they are just reading back the embedded code. The only catch is that they will also flag if the same AI model was used to upscale them, but that's less likely to be an issue in these cases.
Bruh, ai or not they've got a point. They used to be made of tin, the materials and details have declined. For another such example Google hot wheels undercarriage details
Even the old plastic ones were on fucking point. Nowadays they look like a barbapapa fucked a jar of playdough and birthed an amalgamation of equal parts horror and regret.
Maybe its fake but this is a real phenomenon just not from enshittification but because they still use the same presses as they used to back then. Interest in these figurines has gone down so i guess it wasnt worth it to remake them. The loss in detail is from wear and tear.
I'm assuming they think this "detector" is just another AI that's guessing if the image was AI (which isn't the case with SynthID, it's an invisible watermark left behind by the AI used to generate the media that's baked into the generated media for the sole purpose of identifying if the media was made or modified using AI)
ive had someone genuinely tell me that a synthid detection is unreliable. like the watermark could like accidentally be put on an image or something. they would not listen to anyone trying to explain what synthid is
It's actually a good measure when you think about it, hear me out.
Back in 68 the people who made things for the boomer generation made it to a standard, so they got the best toys etc, but as the boomer grow up and took over they cut corners and cheapend to maximise profits. And end up in 2026 where everything's a mess
What I'm trying to say is they are the ones saying things were better back then but are the ones guiding the ship
I mean even as a kid I remember having some older army man little figure and one time my parents bought me full set where there was a new mold of this old guy and he was so thin and shitty compared to the old one
Stupid AI generated posts and statements that bot accounts are using to get boomers to engage so they can sell the account when it hits x amount of followers.
The first soldier is what could be but isn't, unless you buy figures for dioramas etc. Toys are these shitty, flat (like, wtf are they so flat?) models that I just hate.
Second is what I generally remember them looking like in my childhood. The third is how they looked after unpacking, because the plastic was so bad.
The issue is material. In the past it wasn't good, now it can be good but that's not cost efficient.
Definitely AI but this wouldn’t really be about enshittification at all. If they’re using the same mold to create millions of army men since the 60s then that mold is going to degrade and the plastic is going to look shittier
Or, if people make knockoffs from the same mold it’s going to end up lower quality either way
To be fair... the fact that it uses AI is still showing the point of "enshitification" since AI has been seen as that just the same... so, "task failed successfully"?
SynthID works differently. SynthID detection doesn't look at the details on the image itself but instead detects a hidden watermark ingrained faintly into the image intentionally added by the image generator. The best analogy I can think of is like adding a faint QR code into the image and making something that can scan very faint QR codes
The top model physically couldn't look like that without painting/washing. Plastic army men like these have never usually been pre-washed because it'd drive the price way up.
You have always been able to buy both good quality and shit quality versions of these army men. When I was a child in the 90s, you could get a pack of hundreds of rubbish ones in the news agents for £1.
SO the issue here is that the AI detection services are incredibly inaccurate. At this point, unless it is very obvious, we are in a position where we are bent over on our knees and they can pretty much do whatever they want. Shit's fucked, yo
Sure, unless you use a free and easily accessible tool to disrupt the id, then that percentage plummets. Tell me I'm wrong and I'll point you to google where you can find any umber of tools to use for that very thing
Why do people look at this shit and somehow still manage to miss the message by obsessing over some irrelevant detail? The fact that everything is getting enshitified is not a new thing. And we all know it's just getting worse. This may be an exaggerated example made with image manipulation, but in general I've seen this irl. Those soldiers in 1968 probably came in a box each in its individual compartment in the box, because plastics were a novelty and they really put more effort into making them. Now they just stamp these in millions of pieces cheaply in China and dump them in a cheap bag and off it goes on the shelves. That's the message.
Also, just because something has Ai marking, no one knows what was the actual manipulation. Was it just cropped, was it just added text, are all the images made up, which is it?
Might as well have been real, I mean using the same mold for injection molding for 58 years would have the same result as the picture, if not even worse - depending on how much use it'd get.
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u/veryblocky 15h ago
Social media platforms should be required to detect the watermark and display largely that an image was made with AI