AI Image Detection Tools: What Can They Do?

Top 4 AI Image Detection Tools

Ever have to pause at an image online to see if it is created by a human or a machine? Because let's face it, AI-generated images are becoming more and more realistic. 

Right now, you spot the difference with some simple clues. But in the future, you might need the help of AI image detection tools to do that. Let's dig deeper into these image recognition tools.

Is AI Stealing Artists’ Works?

“AI art” refers to images created by using AI models such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, or DALL-E. These AIs can generate realistic and detailed images based only on text prompts.

But these AIs don’t just come up with their ideas. They are pre-trained on a lot of data from other artists’ works and use that data to draw images. This has caused some arguments among artists and critics.

Some artists think that AI art is not fair to human artists, whose work is used to teach these AIs, and that it makes human artists less valued and respected. They also wonder if AI will make artists become lazy and less creative when they have a tool that can almost do all the work for them.

Some AI artists and supporters, however, defend AI art as a new and exciting form of expression. It can inspire and challenge human artists. They argue that AI art is not a threat, but a tool, that can enhance human creativity and collaboration. For them, AI art is not entirely autonomous, but depends on human input, guidance, and interpretation.

So how can we tell the difference between human-made and AI-generated art? How can we identify AI art? 

3 Tips To Identify An AI-Generated Art

AI-generated images are not flawless. They often have some anomalies or errors. Here are some tips to help you spot them:

Check for watermark

Check for watermark

This tip can only be used on DALL-E-generated photos because DALL-E places a watermark on every photo downloaded from its site. 

The watermark is 5 colored squares that are placed in the bottom right corner of the picture.

However, this tip is not foolproof. You can still download images without a watermark if you know how to do it. And you can still use photo editing software like Photoshop to edit out the watermark.

Look for anomalies

Have you ever seen an image that was made by an AI? They look pretty realistic, right? But they’re not perfect. Sometimes, the more details they try to add, the more errors they make. You might not spot them right away, but if you zoom in, you’ll see some weird things.

Look for anomalies

Let me show you some clues that can help you tell if an image was made by an AI:

• Text: AIs can’t write text yet, so any words or letters you see in the image will be gibberish.
• Painted parts: Some parts of the image might look like they were painted with a brush instead of being photographed.
• Skin texture: AIs like to make skin look smooth and flawless. But that’s not natural, because real skin has marks like freckles or wrinkles.
• Hands: AIs often mess up the number of fingers or arms a person has or make them look unnatural in other ways.

Use AI image detection tools

AIs are getting smarter and better at making images every day. That makes it harder for us to tell if an image is real or not with just our eyes. That’s why we need to use AI image detectors.

There are various tools available for you to use. 

4 Free AI Image Detectors

We will go over 4 free AI image detectors that you can use right away without having to register or download anything. We’ll rank them from the worst to the best based on how well they work and what they can do.

Hugging Face

Hugging Face is a website that has a lot of free tools that anyone can use. But because they’re made by users and they’re free, they might not be very good. And this AI detector is not very good either.

Hugging Face

Hugging Face’s AI detector can only spot simple images that haven’t been edited. So if the image is made by an AI and you don’t touch it, it will say it’s AI. But if you edit the image a little bit with some software, even just a tiny bit, it will say it’s 100% human.

Overall, we give this tool a 4/10 which is why it is at the top of our list.

Optic AI or Not

Optic AI or Not is a much better tool than Hugging Face. It’s free, fast, and accurate. It can spot AI-generated images even if we use Photoshop to change them a little bit.

Optic AI or Not

There’s not much to say about this tool since it’s pretty basic, it gets the job done without much hassle. That’s why we’ll give it a 7/10.

Illuminarty

Illuminarty is a great tool since it has both AI image detection and AI text detection. A slight upgrade from Optic AI or Not is that Illuminarty also shows the percentage of how AI the tool thinks the image is.

Illuminarty

But it is not as accurate as Optic AI or Not. Sometimes it fails to detect obvious fake images or gives very low confidence scores for real images. But you do have the option to upgrade the tool by paying for their paid plans.

Despite its inaccuracy, its attention to detail and extra features make up for it, so we’ll also give Illuniarty a 7/10.

Hivemorderation

Hivemorderation is a much better tool than all of the above. It gives us very detailed and accurate results. It even tells us what AI made the picture.

Hivemorderation

Hivemorderation also has text-detection features with decent accuracy. 

With a cool design, great details, and an easy-to-use user interface, Hivemorderation deserves the top spot with a score of 8.5/10.

How Do AI Image Detectors Work?

If you have tried to search for this exact question on Google, you will most likely find results about AI image recognition rather than image detectors.

Image recognition is a broader term that covers various tasks that involve understanding and processing images using AI. Image recognition can include tasks such as:

• Detect objects: Identify and locate objects in an image, such as “a person wearing a hat” or “a bicycle on the road”. This can be done using vision APIs or neural networks that learn from data.
• Image segmentation: Divide an image into regions based on their content, such as “sky”, “grass”, or “water”. This can be done using computer vision techniques or convolutional neural networks that learn from data.
• Real-time video: Analyze and process video streams in real-time, such as detecting faces, emotions, or actions. This can be done using computer vision techniques or neural networks that learn from data.

Some famous image recognition models are the Yolo model, Ml models, and Google’s Vision AI

Image detector is a more specific term that refers to a task that involves distinguishing real and Ai-generated images. 

AI image detectors work by using deep neural networks, which are composed of layers of artificial neurons that learn from data. These networks are trained on large datasets of images, which provide examples of the input and output for the desired task.

For instance, to train an image classifier, the network is shown images with labels, and learns to associate the features of the images with the labels.

To train an image generator, the network is shown text prompts and images and learns to produce images that match the prompts.

To train an image detector, the network is shown real and fake images and learns to distinguish them based on their features.

As you can see, image recognition and image detection are related but not the same. Image recognition is more general and covers more tasks, while image detector is more specific and focuses on one task. Both use AI techniques such as computer vision, convolutional neural networks, region proposal networks, image recognition, and ml models to achieve their goals.

Are AI Image Detection Tools Accurate?

To test the accuracy of these tools, we used some examples of raw and edited images from various sources, such as DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and Google Images.

We input these images to each tool and recorded their results. Here are our findings:

Tool	Raw Images	Edited Images
Hugging Face	50% correct	0% correct
Optic AI or Not	80% correct	80% correct
Illuminarty	70% correct	60% correct
Hivemorderation	90% correct	90% correct

As you can see, Hugging Face failed to detect any altered images, while Optic AI or Not and Hivemorderation detected most of them correctly. Illuminarty had some errors, but still performed better than Hugging Face.

The Future

So, we know that these tools are not 100% accurate at telling if an image is made by AI or not right now, but what about the future? Will they get better as our technology gets better? Will they be a good way for us to spot AI art? Or will we have to deal with AIs that are so good that they can trick even the best detectors?

Well, we think that it won’t matter in the future if an image is made by AI or not. As we keep making these AIs better, we will also learn to accept them as part of the creative process rather than as a threat to our creativity. We think that these tools will help us be more creative and productive, and make cool art more easy for everyone to enjoy.

For example, remember when the calculator first came out? Teachers were worried that it would make kids lazy and bad at math, and that they would forget how to do simple things like adding and subtracting. Some also thought that calculators would make math less fun and less hard. Some educators even banned the use of calculators until the 1980s. But today, calculators are widely accepted and used in classrooms across the world.

We think that the same thing will happen with AI art. Our initial reaction to a new technology will change over time and we will learn to adapt to it and use it for our benefit. At some point, we won’t care so much if an image is made by AI or not.

Conclusion

AI art is an amazing and tricky thing that makes us think differently about art and creativity. It also makes us ask some hard questions that we need to figure out as a society.

AI image detection tools can help us tell and learn about AI-made images and what they mean. They can also help us stay safe from bad or harmful uses of fake images, like deepfakes or lies.

We hope you learned something new from this article about AI art and how to spot it. We invite you to try out these tools yourself and see what they can do. And remember, always be smart and curious about what you see online!