These past few days, social media has been reeling in shock because of several social media posts depicting small children engaged in a satanic ritual.
These posts included around 10 images and were shared on Facebook, Telegram, and Instagram by user “The Pumpkin Empress“.
These Instagram posts were the original posts on social media, and from there, they were taken by various other users and posted on Facebook and Telegram.
Here’s a post from Facebook:
There’s no surprise that people were appalled and left lots of comments like “These devilish people are running loose.” and “What’s next, a Satanic school?“.
However, in the following days, the creator of the images came out and said that the images were AI-generated. More precisely, The Pumpkin Empress used Midjourney, a very popular AI image-generation tool to create the pictures using specific prompts.
The pictures even have a watermark that says “The Pumpkin Empress” in the bottom-right corner but it’s small enough that people can easily miss it.
The original Facebook post was even edited and now says “This is not real. I created these pics with AI (artificial intelligence) software. The children are not real, this never happened.“
The original poster was contacted by investigative journalists and the media to comment on this event. Even now, Facebook blurs out the original pictures (even though they’re still up).
How Can You Know If Something Is AI-Generated on Social Media?
While it might seem impossible to figure out if something is AI-generated, especially if it’s a really good image, there are some tell-tale signs:
- The weird hands. AI tools are notoriously bad at depicting accurate human hands or any complex limbs, for that matter. No, the recent updates still haven’t fixed that issue. Look for too many or too few fingers
As you can see in the image above (AI-generated image using the prompt “human hands“), the AI doesn’t really know the specifics of human hands.
It doesn’t consistently show 5 fingers, and sometimes, some of the fingers are in weird positions. But you can surely get some accurate pictures if you just redo the prompts over and over again.
- The blur. Sometimes, you’ll notice that some parts of the picture might be blurred out when the rest is crystal-clear. That odd blur is another AI artifact that pops in from time to time. And strangely enough, it’s also related to hands or other appendages
- Incomplete facial features. This one can be downright terrifying. Sometimes, you’ll see incomplete hands, elbows, shoulders, or even faces. Like a face where the nose and half an eye are blurred out. That’s because the AI is having issues being very accurate
Inconsistency, in other words, is what you should be looking for on social media posts if you suspect something to be AI-generated.
At this point, whenever you see something really controversial, you should watch out for any signs of AI inconsistency.
