When Trump was elected, a sentiment I heard was “man, political satirists are gonna have a field day!”

They did not have a field day. The overwhelming consensus (both among mortals on earth and devils in hell) is that Trump-based comedy sucked: it was more boring than a male pig digging a tunnel to South Africa and hackier than Angelina Jolie and Keanu Reeves typing on the same keyboard.

There were exceptions. Tim Heidecker portrays a thin-skinned, blustering Trump pastiche in On Cinema At the Cinema. He is sometimes funny.

But overall, Trump comedy falls into two camps: jokeless “can you believe he said/did that?!?!” reactions, or juvenile “Drumpf is an ugly orange peepee poopoo cheeto Hitler fartbaby” insults that seemed more designed to hurt Trump’s feelings than to elicit on a sapient lifeform’s face the ghost of a smile.

Trump-era comedy had a horrendous heat-to-light ratio. There is only so much mileage to be had in Alec Baldwin pursing his lips and saying “yuge”.

What went wrong?

Trump was already a comedy character

The greatest comedian of the Trump years was Trump himself.

The man is hilarious. He has a diabolic gift for finding the most inappropriate thing possible to say, and then saying it. Calling Apple’s CEO “Tim Apple”. Talking about an African country called “Nambia”. Saying “Belgium is a beautiful city.” His “eulogy” for Colin Powell reads like literal satire, particularly the halfhearted backpedal at the end. “He made plenty of mistakes, but anyway, may he rest in peace!”

This overt jokiness presented a problem for comedians, because it gave them little to work with. The favorite mode of satire is to take something serious, and twist it so that it’s ridiculous. It is difficult to parody a thing that’s already funny.

I’m not even saying “Trump’s too ridiculous to parody, folks!” I’m saying he conducted himself in a broad, facially absurd way that was possibly intentional. He became famous to younger generations as a media star, after all, and surely knows how to play that game.

The cleverest thing Trump ever did was brand himself as a clown. If you’re a clown, people tend to ignore factual errors, inattentiveness, etc. You are judged by a different standard than the rest of humanity. No scandal ever sticks to you. Your gaffes make people laugh. While your opponents get dragged down by seriousness, you can skate through. Eventually, people stop caring about the clownshow. It becomes “oh, he’s just doing that thing he’s always doing.” But the question is: will people elect a clown as President? Apparently (for a brief moment in 2016, at least) the answer was yes!

Once, I was convinced by Scott Adams “Clown Genius” hypothesis: that Trump was knowingly weaponizing absurdity to judo his enemies into submission. Now, I think he mainly got lucky. He was born the way he is, and about ten fortunate things coincided (a timely scandal for Clinton, and so forth) that allowed him to become the President. He was a beneficiary of circumstance who humped the White House door until his dick picked the lock.

Regardless, lots of other people are trying to become tactical clowns. I remember seeing this Dan Crenshaw campaign ad, which turns him into an action hero who jumps out of a plane, does a Marvel landing on the hood of an antifa car, and punches through the windshield. I never saw stuff this cartoony before in US politics, at least not from major candidates. Trump paved the way.

Nobody wanted to laugh at Trump. They wanted to cheer or boo.

One of the better political parodies I’ve seen is Key & Peele on Obama. The bit I linked basically suggests that Obama’s famed “relatability” was cynical, calculating act from a cynical, calculating politician. But here’s the important thing: this is not anti-Obama. It’s basically just exploring a side to his character.

You could never do a bit that subtle about Trump. Firstly, he is not a person who has those kinds of hidden depths. And even if he did, nobody wants to explore them.

In 2016, the US was heavily polarized. The kind of “let’s just laugh at politics” bipartisanship of Yes Minister was no longer possible. Today, you have to take a side. In the media, usually a liberal side. Yes We Can, Minister.

Sara Schaefer had this to say about Trump comedy.

I was talking about this to my friend, fellow comedian Nikki Glaser, and we both agreed that in many ways, we’re too angry and scared to find the funny in Donald Trump’s rule. For me, dark material has to incubate for a really long time before it can make its way to the stage. (To give you an idea, it took me a decade to be able to find a way to write jokes about my mom’s death.) Comedians are now struggling to get the distance needed to make something awful hilarious.

And it’s not just raw outrage aimed at politicians – many of us are dealing with the emotional fallout of the 2016 election in our personal lives. We’re grappling with family members, co-workers and friends who voted for the other side. Everyone is very angry at each other. Nikki summed it up well when she said: “I hate doing Trump jokes because if a section of the audience doesn’t laugh, then I know they voted for him and then I have to spend the rest of the show hating part of my audience.” It’s a two-way street. Not even the comedians can avoid succumbing to The Great American Butthole Tightening.

For these people, comedy had become tangled up in morality and politics possibly to an unhealthy degree.

This jibes with societal shifts I noticed in the late Cracked era. Nobody, nobody gave a rat’s bum about jokes. I remember the imprecations, which usually started with preachy assertions of what comedy is or isn’t. Comedy doesn’t punch down. Comedy comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable. Comedy has always been political!

It’s all well and good to try and use comedy for socially productive purposes. But…well…have you ever seen one of those Evangelicals who help the poor and needy, but underneath it is their real goal, saving souls for Christ? Yeah, it always comes out in the end. Most comedians, circa 2016, were like that. Yes, they told jokes and made audiences laugh (or at least clap)…but that was incidental. Their real purpose was to change the world.

There was a strain of thought among the left that it was almost morally wrong to joke in the age of Trump. “We should be fighting and raging and mourning, not laughing!” Others took the view that joking about Trump could be done, but it was like joking about rape: something to be done very carefully and respectfully.

Steve Almond, writing for WBUR, castigated Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, not for being unfunny, but for being calm. He wanted to see rage and fury. He asserted that the ability to make jokes at all about the incoming administration was a luxury not all Americans could afford.

“The political fate of this country isn’t a joke — especially for our most vulnerable citizens” (…) “the difference between a Biden and Trump presidency is a direct threat to your life, not a punchline” (…) “[believing otherwise is] what the voice of privilege sounds like”.

If you find Trump funny, you are a privileged white person.

Olivia Cathcart states this case even more strongly in Trump Isn’t Funny.

If tragedy plus time equals comedy, then it’s going to be a long time before any Trump jokes can pack a punch again. Trump is a tragedy but one we haven’t had any space from yet. The storm still rages and a new wound opens every day. Desperately trying to wring comedy from such an evil man is like trying to tell knock knock jokes while the Titanic’s going down. I have no interest or patience for your “zany” sketch while mid-drowning in frozen waters, and I cringe just thinking about the first way-too-soon Vice-esque movie we’ll get about this.

Nothing about Trump is funny. Nothing about him can be funny. Stop trying to force it.

Earlier, she says:

I’m so tired. I’m so exhausted. Each bombshell feels more like a fallen acorn. Not because it doesn’t matter, but because it doesn’t seem to work as a weapon against him, neither as fact nor fodder for jokes.

She reveals that she thinks of jokes as weapons. Their point is not to make anyone laugh, but to inflict damage on Trump, a person she hates. And if they are not doing that, she has little use for them.

On the other side of the aisle, conservatives who took even the mildest jabs at the President became inundated by angry Trump supporters calling them a cuck and a traitor and a RINO.

I have not discussed “conservative comedy”, but here’s a flawed but interesting video on where they were at as of 2016. They had fallen prey to many of the same ailments of the left. They were too angry to be funny. Or too something to be funny.

There was simply no room for equivocation where Trump was concerned. You were with him or against him.

Trump is confusing and complicated

As Sam Kriss once noted, Trump makes little sense. He is like a fictional character created by a bad writer.

He’s a man’s man who refuses to drink beer and eats pizza with a knife and fork. He’s the voice of Rust Belt America while being a New York liberal with a gold toilet. He’s fanatically obsessed with his appearance, yet thinks it’s perfectly acceptable to look like…that. He’s a classless boor who’s also a germaphobe. He thinks handshakes are “barbaric” and gets angry when someone dips the same nacho into guacamole twice. He’s the first President to like soccer instead of football.

His qualities are strong, but you cannot assign a one-note character to them, like you can for Nixon (“crook”), Clinton (“sex pervert”), or Bush (“dumb redneck”). It’s hard to “nail” Trump with a comedic portrayal, much as it’s hard to nail an octopus to a wall. He doesn’t appear to have an inner life that can be pulled apart. He exists as a series of flamboyant poses and gestures, many of them contradictory.

Political views? Bad news, he doesn’t have any! He’s essentially a man who likes being on TV, likes being popular, and who likes having people chant his name and applaud when he speaks. He wants to save America, not out of principle, but so that he’ll be the one to save it.

He does have strong viewpoints, but they never come from a coherent ideology. As far as I can tell, he sees a social issue on TV, gets an idea on how to solve it stuck in his head, and gets so excited he won’t metaphorically change the channel for years or sometimes decades.

“He might read something in the paper and immediately you’d get an impromptu meeting on trade,” said a person familiar with the president’s scheduling. “It’s just more impromptu than like a month in advance you have a policy time set that you’re going to work up to.”

Yes, he got sucked into the Republican Party applause-circle, and has learned to mimic their speech patterns. But he’s fundamentally not one of them, as displayed by the fact that he often forgets the script and says what he really thinks.

“I like taking the guns early. Like in this crazy man’s case that just took place in Florida, he had a lot of firearms – they saw everything – to go to court would have taken a long time, so you could do exactly what you’re saying, but take the guns first, go through due process second.” — Donald Trump

He is curiously stuck in the past. I don’t mean he’s conservative. In many ways, he’s not. His biggest interests were:

• the war on drugs
• inner-city crime
• reviving US industry, particularly coal and steel
• winning trade wars against China

These were all talking points from the 80s and 90s.

I’m not saying Trump’s concerns aren’t important. But he campaigned on them to the detriment of more timely issues. He had to be prodded hard before he reacted appropriately to, say, COVID, or the opioid crisis. Imagine a left-aligned politician who’s obsessed with overpopulation, holes in the ozone layer, and saving pandas. Yet he dived into social media addiction with mind-numbing force.

None of it really adds up to a character.

It’s hard to insult Trump without “punching down”

Given that Trump’s character is a maze of contradictions, what’s left? His physical aspect. But what can you say about that?

That he’s fat? That’s sizeist. That he’s old? That’s gerontophobic. That he has small feminine hands? Homophobic. That Melania is a trophy wife? Misogynistic and xenophobic.

Additionally, Trump’s tastes…

• Pro wrestling
• Junk food
• Action movies
• Daytime TV
• Conspicuous spending

…Are decidedly low-class. They sound like they belong to either trailer trash or a rich black rapper. The only “high-class” activity he conspicuously engages in is golf. And making fun of golf is the only thing hackier than making fun of Trump.

Trump Fatigue

I was tired of hearing about Trump. You were tired of hearing about Trump. We were all tired of hearing about Trump. The way he seemingly seemed to insert himself into every conversation is something I remember with a shudder.

There was nothing to say about him. Nobody understood him. It was just “Trump, huh?” for four long years.

Overfamiliarity is the enemy of every comic.

Because of the extended phenotype

This is a little awkward to explain, but makes perfect sense when you think about it.

Basically, our bodies are larger—much, much larger—than we give them credit for. Richard Dawkins writes about “extended phenotypes”—the idea is that although our genes solely encode proteins via DNA bases, they do more: by modulating our behavior, they allow us alter environments in ways that benefit our (meaning their; meaning the genes) survival. From a genetic perspective, there is little difference between a beaver’s fur (a dead covering over the beaver that has undergone a form of cell death called cornification), and a beaver’s dam (a pile of gnawed sticks and logs). Both have (or neither) could be considered part of the beaver’s body. In essence, there is no real place where the beaver’s body begins or ends. Where does the life begin under our skin? We are surrounded by a tight-knit halo of death: a nebula of flaking skin and hairs dying according to a keratinocyte differentiation programme. We are humans who have modified the world to suit us. So according to the extended phenotype theory, the entire world—and shortly the universe beyond it—is also part of our bodies. My lawn needed a shave. So did my beard. I found the two concepts becoming entwined in my mind. As I started mowing the lawn, I felt bitter eruptions of pain all across my skin, like fireballs stinging me. I looked down and saw hair falling from my body as I pushed the lawnmower. Next, I started pulling up weeds. Blood began gushing from the earth, then I realized it wasn’t coming from the earth, but from my own body.

This is the reason why Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) was bad for comedy.

Most guides on detecting AI images are from 2022 and have aged like dinosaur milk.

“AI can’t draw hands.”

“AI can’t draw straight lines.”

“AI can’t spell words.”

This is fantastic advice…assuming you still live in the year 2022. However, studies show that 46% of people have upgraded to a later, worse year called “2024”, and if you are one of them (condolences), this no longer applies. You cannot rely on AI images having such egregious errors. So what can you rely on?

There are still some “tells” of AI imagery—many are strangely getting worse as the technology advances—but often they’re not errors so much as they’re “conceptual tension.” Basically, an image generated by (for example) Midjourney has several different priorities:

1) fulfill the user’s prompt

2) look coherent

3) look attractive

4) satisfy a moderation policy

5, 6, 7 etc) do a bunch of crap the user isn’t even aware of.

This is a lot of plates to juggle, and if the goals clash (ie, the user prompts for something ugly or incoherent), the image can get subtly pulled in different directions. I’ll show examples of what this looks like soon, but this sense of confusion—and not extra fingers—is arguably the best way to spot AI images now. It’s not a smoking gun. It can be subtle, and requires a careful eye. But sadly, this is an age of photorealistic fake media, and we must learn to be careful.

Keep an eye on what your older relatives are doing on social media, by the way. They might not be safe.

PSA: Delete Facebook

Facebook is the internet’s fecal tract. A viscerally unpleasant place, but you can learn a lot about what’s making the online world sick from studying it. And right now, it’s inundated by AI image-spam.

As we speak, millions of retirees are blissfully thumbing their way down a black sewer of nonexistent houses, fake people, and assorted nightmares.

These pictures are bizarre. Many don’t even try to look convincing. Some appear to be the work of aliens with only the faintest understanding of our world.

What’s “peach cream”? Who makes their own birthday cake? Why does history’s second oldest woman have prison tattoos? Why does the cake say “386”? Why is there a gun in my mouth?

(Without getting distracted by this, it’s probable that these accounts are run by the same few bad actors. The repetitive phrasing and subject matter is telling—I’ve seen dozens of cakes made with “peach cream and filling”—which makes me wonder about their sky-high engagement numbers. If you have the technical know-how to manipulate dozens or hundreds of fake accounts, you might also be viewbotting.)

Should we care about this? Even if you have a “let people enjoy things!” outlook on life…

…It’s never a good feeling to see an older relative losing touch with reality. And suppose this is all the front for a scam? I’m not sure this alien race of 396-year-old cake-baking prison-tattooed grandmas has our best interests at heart.

But when you tell a boomer that an image is fake, they might ask “How do you know?” And that’s a fair question: how do you know? Vibes? Because that’s the world we live in? Some AI images are incredibly realistic. It’s easy to get stuck in a Twilight Zone of “I know this is fake but I can’t explain why.”

This is an AI generated image. Can you find any mistakes?^[1]Tricky, isn’t it? Here’s my stab at what’s wrong with it. First: it’s convenient that the photo is too blurry for us to see fine details. I don’t say … Continue reading

In an age of photorealistic imagery, here are what I see as the signs of AI fakery.

AI Images Are Excessively Archetypal

When you prompt AI for a cow, it’s never content to just give you a “cow”. It gives you the cowiest cow that ever cowed. The God-emperor of cows. A divine bovine. A cow with every “cow” trait cranked to the max on its stat sheet. A cow-icature.

You’ll always get a Holstein or a Jersey, because those are the most famous cow breeds. It will be standing in a green field on a farm, because that’s where cows live. There will be other cow-related details thrown in (like a red barn in the background, or a bell around its neck). Everything will be cow cow cow.

The image above is by Dall-E3. Midjourney V6 is more realistic^[2]I have long suspected that Dall-E3 images look shiny and fake on purpose. Sadly, there will be a major tragedy or crisis triggered by deepfakes at some point, and OpenAI doesn’t want one of … Continue reading but has similar issues.

Contrast these perfect AI-generated cows with an actual photograph.

A real cow does not exist as a perfect Platonic archetype. It has a certain amount of not-cowness mixed in: flies, a crooked horn, a limp, asymmetry, visible scars, or whatever. AI seldom (if ever) depicts these details, because they constitute deviance from the prompt. The user did not ask for a cow with a crooked horn. They asked for a cow.

Synthetic images have little of what Roland Barthes called “The Reality Effect”—the thousands of small imperfections that make an object seem “real”. AI apparently needs to see a lot of something in its pretraining data before spontaneously including it in an image (note how infrequently Midjourney remembers to put a tag in the cow’s ear, even though nearly every real-life cow has one). When you see an image that’s just a perfect depiction of something—and nothing but that thing—get suspicious. Real life is never that perfect.

AI image models struggle with subtlety. They can mimic almost any art style, but it’s usually a loud, witless parody of that style. The concept that a picture might have depths—that its theme might require thought and interpretation, instead of being blared at the cheap seats—is foreign to them.

I find a lot of AI art really tiresome, to be honest. It’s the visual equivalent of being shouted at through a bullhorn. Human-created artwork is often subtle and seductive: the longer you stare at “Too Late” by Windus, the deeper you fall into its world and story. AI artwork often just feels like disposable junk: a loud surface with nothing substantial underneath.

Going in a darker direction, on 12 Oct 2023, the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shared a photo of what’s believed to be a burned baby.

(Content warning: burned baby.)

This is a horrifying image, and certain ideologically motivated individuals claimed it was an AI fake. They even got a Ben Shapiro retweet tagged with a community note, stating that this had been “proven”.

I took one glance at that image and thought “real”.

The reality effect is like a slap in the face. You see those sad little smudges of ash on the rails? Those random dust bunnies (or whatever) against the skirtingboard? AI never puts things like that in an image. When AI makes something dirty, it does so in a stylized, aesthetic way. The dirt will look like it was brushed into place by a professional set designer. Those random smudges in Netanyahu’s photo are too anticlimactic and “incidental”.

Also, if you could prompt an AI image generator for a “burned baby”, you would get something that unmistakably looks like a baby. Not a hunk of charcoal that barely looks like anything.

Other people cropped a few pixels from the image, uploaded it to AIorNot, and got a verdict of authentic, thus “proving” not a damned thing, because AI detectors are trash. They do not work.

I am not saying Netanyahu’s photo is definitely real. It could have been faked through some other method (not that there’s any reason to believe it was). But anyone calling this image “AI generated” is either lying, or being a liar’s useful idiot.

Nothing is Ugly. Everything is Beautiful.

In moments of doubt, ask: “Is there anything about this image that should be ugly, but isn’t?”

Every real photo has some ugliness. Zoom in on the nose of the real cow above, and it’s packed with dried snot.

Compare with Midjourney’s bovines, who thoughtfully blew their noses before being photographed.

I have mentioned the lack of flies. Also, the grass isn’t littered with piles of shit. Anyone who’s seen a cow knows how unrealistic this is.

AI models have a strong aversion to gross or nasty things. They struggle to capture the mundane grubbiness of real life, except in a stylized way. Prompt for an ugly person, and you either get a fantasy goblin… (Midjourney V6)^[3]Midjourney also has a “–style raw” flag, which supposedly omits the model’s “beautifying” process. It didn’t help much. To Midjourney, ugly person = DnD … Continue reading

…a “gritty” character actor in a Coen Brothers film that women would probably thirst over if he was real… (SDXL)

…or a refusal. (Dalle-E3)

Genuine, untrammeled ugliness is so rare that it sometimes goes viral. I remember when Loab became a thing. Someone claimed that by prompting SD a certain way you could uncover a paranormal cryptid in latent space.

As was noted by feminists, in most pictures of “Loab” there’s nothing supernatural about her. She’s not a demon or Lovecraftian monster. She’s simply an unattractive, unsmiling woman with a skin condition! People like Loab are everywhere in real life—I see uglier faces every time I go to a hardware store—but they’re strikingly rare in AI-generated images. So rare that they can literally be passed off as paranormal monsters.

Look For “Concept Merge”

This is awkward to explain, but you’ve seen it before.

Basically, it describes the AI tendency to get stuck between two contradictory ideas. Rather than choosing one or the other, it mashes them together. Here’s an image I swiped off Facebook. (I’m not crediting any of these losers.)

Looks good, but what are those objects on the wall? Brightening the image…

Are they frying pans? No, they have shield bosses. But if they’re shields, why do they have frying-pan handles?

This is concept merge. The prompt was clearly something like “a rustic cabin with a Viking boat in it”, but when it came time to add objects to the wall, Midjourney had a choice between “frying pans” (appropriate for a rustic cabin, inappropriate for a Viking boat), or “shields” (appropriate for a Viking boat, inappropriate for a rustic cabin). It got stuck, couldn’t make a choice, and eventually created weird frying pan/shield combinations.

Concept merge is a frequent feature of AI images, like the one below. It was shared on Twitter by someone who was convinced it was perfect, with no AI mistakes.

Obviously it has many: the girl has three nostrils, weird small gerbil-teeth, hair made of transparent plastic (note the left eyebrow visible under her bangs), deformed egg-yolk irises, and hairstrands that combine, multiply, and flow against physics in dozens of places. She has the generic “sameface anime girl” look endemic to a thousand LORAs such as Wowifier. The image makes incongruent stylistic choices: her exaggerated facial design (huge eyes + tiny nose + pointy chin) looks odd next to the realistic-looking skin and fabric.

But most striking are her clothes. What is she meant to be wearing?

1. A studded leather jacket?
2. A crop top?
3. A schoolgirl sailor fuku?

StableDiffusion couldn’t make up its mind…so it gave her all three at once!

Human artists do not make mistakes like this. Even the shittiest artist does not draw two totally different things at the same time. AI images split the difference and compromise. Faced with two choices, they dive right down the middle.

Concept merge is most obvious in small details. Look for least important thing in the image that’s still a distinct object. Often, it will be a couple of different objects smushed together.

Bricks. Tiles. Planks.

This will be fixed some day, but right now, AI cannot do tesselated patterns. Even the task of depicting a chessboard or a brick wall defeats every model.

It’s a classic case of attacker’s advantage. Tesselated patterns are defined by their uniformity, and every brick the AI renders must be perfect. A 95% success rate isn’t good enough: one malformed brick gives away the illusion. The AI has many chances to fail and only one chance to succeed.

So whenever you’re on the fence about an image, look for a fence in the image. Or a brick wall. Or roof tiles.

“Honey, can you go to Home Depot and pick up a single brick that’s about 4 feet long and bendy in the middle? You know the kind.”

“We’ll also need a perfectly square wooden plank for the floor.”

(This is more “concept merge”, by the way. The prompt was probably “a kitchen in a rustic cabin”. Rustic cabins have wood floors, but kitchens are usually tiled, so the planks assume a weird tile-like character.)

What other things can you look for?

Buttons. Is a row of buttons on a jacket spaced uniformly? Or are some further apart than others? In the grandma cake image, note that the top two buttons on her cardigan are spaced closer together than the bottom two. Likewise, the knobs on the thing in the background are unevenly spaced.

Electrical cables and ropes and strings—particularly if there are multiple overlapping ones. Are they sensible? Can you trace them from place to place with your finger, or do they become scribbled tangled-up garbage?

Tree branches are a big one. They’re so complex that they often look like random scribbled nonsense, and AI depicts them as such. Zoom in and you’ll see something’s not right.

Some beautiful concept merge here too. Is the cabin made of logs or stones?

(The comments on that picture were depressing. “Ha! You’re gonna feel like an idiot when the river floods and your cabin gets washed out!” If Mount Stupid was real, Facebook’s users would be Tenzing fucking Norgay.)

Also, zoom in on chain links.

Again, this might be fixed next year, or tomorrow for all I know. But for now, AI struggles with thin, complicated objects that exhibit a coherent structure.

The wonderful thing about the real world is that physical laws apply everywhere, equally, to all objects. A speck of dust is no less subject to the law than the titanic mass of Jupiter. As is written in the gospels, the regard of God is upon even the smallest sparrow.

AI does not care for sparrows. It has a limited bucket of competence, and lavishes it upon the central, important subject of the image. The small things get forgotten about, so zoom in on them.

Learn Basic Media Literacy

I hope I do not sound condescending or sarcastic. But whenever something happens in the world of synthetic media—whether it’s the GAN deepfakes of 2017, or Sora in 2024—we see the same histrionic reactions, over and over.

“Facts are over. Truth is over. We can’t trust photos anymore!”

Why were you trusting photos before? Does Photoshop not exist? Can’t a 100% real picture still be used to trick and deceive? How does a naïf like you have any money left in his bank account?

As Randall Munroe once observed, every anxiety about deepfakes could be applied to words. “You mean people can just…lie to you? Say that the sky is green when it’s blue? Say that the moon’s made of cheese? Oh my God, nobody can trust anything! We’re in a post truth era!”

Yes, deception is a problem. But it is not insurmountable. It hasn’t spelled the end of truth as we know it. We can defeat liars, whether they use words or photos or (soon) videos. We need to take the natural skepticism we have toward words (“talk is cheap!” / “money talks, bullshit walks!”) and allow it to flow over to images as well. This is an easy thing to do. So easy that there’s no excuse not to be doing it already.

When you see a photo of something alarming, ask questions like:

• Where did this image come from? What is its source?
• If it’s a photograph, who took it?
• Has the person sharing it built up any social capital that would inspire me to trust them?
• How easy would this image be to fake? Would anyone benefit from doing so? (if unsure, default to “very easy” and “yes”)
• People never take just one photo of really cool thing. Can I find multiple photos, from different angles? Is it plausible that the Pope would go out in public wearing a puffer jacket and exactly four photos of it would exist?
• Is this photo even physically possible to take?

Someone shared this photo.

The pelican’s body looks AI generated (“fur or feathers” concept merge). I don’t know about the head. It looks far more detailed than any I can get out of Midjourney—did someone crop out a pelican’s head from a photograph, and paste it in using Photoshop? It doesn’t seem to connect to the body.

But there’s zero chance that it’s real. It’s implausible that a drone would snap such a high-quality photo, perfectly framed and lit. We’ve seen pictures of birds flying into drones. They look like this.

This is another case of AI getting too good. It creates a photorealistic image even when we wouldn’t expect one.

Postscript: How To Recognize AI Generated Text

Models Have a “Voice”

We all know “ChatGPT tone” by now. People mistakenly call it “bland” and “generic”. It’s actually the most distinctive writing style on earth. I can recognize ChatGPT-created text within the first 1-2 sentences.

“Dive into the fascinating world of “skub“, a mesmerizing concept that echoes through time like a haunting symphony, unraveling a captivating portrait of the human imagination. “Skub” is more than just a word. It’s a philosophy. A lifestyle. A poignant reminder that divisive concepts can also unite us. As we delve further into “skub”, it is important to be mindful of diverse perspectives, and to recognize that “skub” may be controversial among certain groups. Together, “pro-skub” and “anti-skub” activists weave a synergistic tapestry, an intimate dance that highlights the positives of “skub” while remaining mindful of its potential impacts. So, in conclusion, whether you wear a “pro-skub” or “anti-skub” T-shirt, let us stand together in solidarity and mutual respect, allowing our diverse viewpoints to forge a better, more inclusive tomorrow.

(I didn’t generate that, I typed it from memory.)

Nostalgebraiest once described this as a HR managerial fantasy of how humans talk. Peppy and upbeat, with a hint of supercilious smugness. Supremely confident, while being frantically neurotic that it could offend or confuse someone. It over-qualifies and undermines itself with weasel phrases and ambiguity. ChatGPT is so terrified of saying something wrong that it doesn’t care whether it says anything right.

ChatGPT has the most exaggerated writing style of any chatbot, but they all have distinctive voices. Gemini loves contrastive “it’s more than just [thing x], it’s [thing y]” sentences. When you ask Grok to diss something, it always says “you’re like a walking talking [x]”

Many other models are trained on synthetic data from ChatGPT (whether they know it or not), and echo ChatGPT’s pablum.

Lots of Filler Adjectives

AI models are addicted to pretty but empty adjectives. Everything is captivating or enchanting or inspiring.

These are filler adjectives. They are vague, nearly meaningless, and add virtually nothing to the text. Any writing coach would tell you to cut them.

Take “captivating”. Its definition is “capable of attracting and holding interest”…but that could be anything. Sunsets are captivating. Car wrecks are captivating. Crossword puzzles are captivating. If an adjective could equally be applied to love’s first kiss and to a weird bug smashed on a car windshield, then it’s probably better to drill down to the metal and explain exactly what makes the thing captivating.

AI-generated text abhors such specificity. It casts a broad net over the reader’s mind, encouraging them to add their own meaning. You might have your own idea of what “haunting” means, so when you read “he played a haunting melody on the violin” this can easily engage your senses in a way that seems profound. It seems like the AI is reading your mind! In reality, it’s something of a parlor trick. There were no magic slippers, and the profundity was supplied by you.

Sarah Constantin wrote about a thing called “Ra”.

Ra […] can roughly be summarized as the drive to idealize vagueness and despise clarity. […] You know how universal gods are praised with formulas that call them glorious, mighty, exalted, holy, righteous, and other suchlike adjectives, all of which are perfectly generic and involve no specific characteristics except wonderfulness? That’s what Ra is all about. […] Ra is evident in marketing that is smooth, featureless, full of unspecified potential goodness, “all things to all people,” like Obama’s 2008 campaign.

“All things to all people” is a good way of putting ChatGPT’s writing style. It appears to fluently speak dozens of languages. In truth, it speaks only one: Ra.

AI Text Is Tonally Inappropriate

If someone is using AI to write their social media posts, this is usually obvious, because the text will not match the tone expected of the conversation.

When a human enters a social space, they subconsciously “read the room”, and adjust their voice (or writing style) to fit. If everyone is using slangy contractions, they will too. If everyone’s writing in a stiff, formal way, they will too. Linguists call this a “code switch“. AI usually has no idea where its text will end up. Thus, it cannot read the room, cannot code switch, and its output will be very “general”, disconnected from the discussion going on around it.

This is easy to recognize in practice. @fchollet tweeted this:

“Accelerating progress” should mean increasing the breadth and depth of our search for meaning & solutions. Increasing the diversity and creativity of our cultural production and consumption. To a large extent, I feel like generative AI achieves the opposite. It collapses everything into a narrower, standardized, derivative space. It might even result in cultural stagnation if left unchecked. Not for too long though, since people will simply grow out of it, eventually. Humans have a built-in drive towards interestingness. They get bored quickly.”

He received a number of replies. One was written by an AI. Can you spot it? Read them carefully.

1. Depends on the input, bland input=bland output.
2. Yes. Several years ago I was impressed… even now I’m impressed, but I’m not interested anymore: meaningless texts, generic art
3. We get bored too quickly
4. Very well said.
5. There’s a parallelism with sports betting: the most probable outcome is the less interesting, thus the smaller prize.
6. And/or the AI may get better at producing interesting results
7. Generative AI is a pattern extender. That’s it. This is a very good thing though.
8. Certainly, generative AI can seem limiting in terms of truncating our creative scope. However, shifting perspective, we may see it as a tool that can enhance our own creativity. Much like a kaleidoscope, it’s our interpretation of AI’s output that truly shines.
9. This is 100% about not allowing a better approach and a 1a trojan
10. “people will simply grow out of it, eventually.” That sounds like an implausible prediction. (Did people grow out of their propensity to get sucked into addicting tech in other cases?). Is there a concrete outcome in, say, a decade, that would tell us if it was or was not true?
11. Companies will pay people to do nothing but create so that they can give data to the ai

#8 isn’t a sore thumb, it’s an amputation. Aside from being generic feelgood blather (not that the human replies are necessarily any more insightful), it simply doesn’t look like a Twitter reply. Nobody says “however, shifting perspectives…” on the Bird Site.

(Plus, kaleidoscopes are hollow tubes containing angled mirrors and chips of glass. They don’t “shine”. Mixed-up metaphors are very common in AI writing.)

You can tell AI to imitate the a style, but that often leads to an unconvincing “hello, fellow kids!” affect (“Not gunna lie, some of those AI art pieces be lookin fire 🔥 tho lol”), burdened with excessive amounts of “style”. Conversational registers can get incredibly specific, and a failed mimickry attempt can be even more revealing than no attempt at all (I asked Gemini to write replies in the style of a /r/redscarepod poster. It came up with stuff like “The hot take I didn’t know I needed. Generative AI is like the cultural equivalent of the McRib.” Talk like that on /r/RSP and you’d get called a cop.)

Yes, some of those replies are innocuous, and wouldn’t attract notice. But if a bot constantly talked like that to an adversary dedicated to unmasking it, it would be exposed.

It’s easy for AI to fool a careless human. They were doing it in the 1960s. An observant one is a different matter. It’s the brick problem again: AI can get it right some of the time, and maybe even most of the time, but if it even slips up once…

“All of your clues can be defeated with about 5 seconds of prompt engineering. You know that, right?”

What do you want from me? If there was a bulletproof way to spot an AI image, I’d tell you. There simply isn’t one.

All of these hints are vague and “vibes” based. All require a close eye. All produce false positives (many photographers employ a staged, archetypal style. And ChatGPT had to learn its writing style from somewhere…) All can be overcome by prompting, inpainting, and Photoshop.

But there’s good news: most AI scammers are lazy too lazy to do that.

Whenever an AI-related scam hits the public’s eye, what’s striking is how flagrantly incompetent they are. They refuse to do any work to make their fraud believable. Remember that fake Willy Wonka event in Ireland? Remember how it had gibberish AI text on the flyers? This is your outreach! The one thing people see! It boggles the mind!

This is a level of laziness that I didn’t know existed. He could have easily fixed the text in Canva, or, hell, MS Paint. Even if he had zero graphic design skills, Fiver’s right there. It would have cost virtually nothing to have his goddamn ads look professional. Yet for the person running the event, “virtually nothing” was still a price too high.

And what about those repugnant Facebook images from pages called JESUS LUV U and the like?

This is not the work of a Machiavellian criminal genius. This is the work of an impoverished Malaysian contract worker, slaving away in a 45C cubical, creating 600 pieces of content per day so he doesn’t get fired or deported. He doesn’t care about quality. Why would he? It just has to be good enough to satisfy his boss (who also doesn’t care about quality, because he, too, is but a cog in a larger system. Hey, you look like you need to read Zvi on Moral Mazes. Understand its lesson, and the world will make about 17% more sense.)

There is no reason to do a good job in that scenario. It’s not as if he’ll win a trophy at the Scammy Awards this year if he makes an image look realistic. (“And the award for best deepfake goes to…Muhammad Awang! Keep it up, and we’ll print an extra visa for your sex-trafficked sister!”). Literally nobody cares.

There’s also the Nigerian Prince effect. Scam emails don’t actually benefit from being clever. They target the mentally ill, or people who don’t have a skeptical bone in their body. If you are capable of asking critical questions, you will never fall for the scam anyway.

Obviously really stupid con artists get caught. But are there smarter ones that aren’t being detected?

I don’t know. My honest impression, based on a glance at the rubbish flowing across my own Facebook feed, that >90% of these people are lazy, careless bottom-feeders. Click on their pages, and everything is bad. Look at the grandma baking a cake at the start of the article. The person prompting didn’t even take ten seconds to prompt a plausible number onto the birthday cake. Expecting them to fix fine mistakes in Photoshop is like expecting them to sail to the moon in a teacup or empty the ocean with a spoon. They are seemingly all like this.

Tech evangelist types are fond of telling us that AI has democratized software engineering, allowing non-programmers to implement their ideas. Well, that’s also true for frauds: specifically, lazy wannabes who would like to make money unethically but can’t quite figure out how to do so. AI—which can generate limitless text and imagery on command—is their Wonka’s golden ticket to a land of “ENCHERINING ENTERTAINMENT”. But they cannot escape who and what they are—incompetents—and give themselves away at every turn.

Horace once wrote “Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt”. Translation: if you suck, you suck. That’s my hope: that most criminals are just too lazy or dumb to do much with AI. Capabilities advance, but human ineptitude is forever.

You are not supposed to accuse people of being insane on the internet. It is obvious that Kanye West suffers from bipolar disorder. His swings between wild creativity and nihilistic self-destructiveness are indicative. But pointing that out would, of course, be stigmatizing people with bipolar disorder. I’m not his therapist. I have not made an informed diagnosis. So I’m not allowed to speak the obvious, no matter how much sense it makes, or how nonjudgmentally I say it.

Yet occasionally someone is obviously, deeply, flagrantly mad in such an expressive way that there’s no way to escape a reckoning with it. But our reactions are counterproductive, and often mad themselves. Often, we valorize the person, and regard their madness as a form of “specialness”.

Here are two pieces of writing on this topic I find profound. They both basically typed out my beliefs better than I could. I have all these little half-excavated thought-fossils in my mind, buried in sand, and I can’t quite get up the energy to rip them out. It’s nice when I don’t have to, when someone else has captured those same thoughts as huge, roaring, living dinosaurs, far better than anything I could write.

The first piece is Matt Lakeman’s 2020 blog post about The Room, and the Disaster Artist, and the toxic cult around “auteur” Tommy Wiseau. He has since taken it down, and turned his site into a travel blog. But it’s really good.

I read Disaster Artist on a whim when the movie came out. I’ve since gone through the audiobook 3.5 times and can confidently say it’s one of my favorite books of all time. I expected just to hear funny anecdotes about the making of a famously awful movie and the man behind it, but I found so much more depth. In my eyes, Disaster Artist is an examination of insanity (which I am defining as “the inability to perceive reality to the degree of low or non-functionality in regular life”). The book is a pushback against a subtle cultural norm that sees crazy people as having some sort of gift or potential or insight that everyone else doesn’t.

The next is Tom Ewing’s 60,000 word exploration of Cerebus, which is a 300 issue British comic about an aardvark whose creator went insane. Apparently the back half of the comic devolves into bristling thickets of gynophobic rants and mystical Torah analysis.

Here is a comment I left on the last entry, Aard Labour Epilogue: Dance Of The Aardvark Catchers.

Thanks for writing this series. I enjoyed it immensely. It actually inspired me (contra doctor’s orders) to start reading Cerebus.

I read issues #1-#3, then skipped ahead to somewhere in the high 200s. The difference was amazing—going from a bud sprouting on a stem, to a huge rotting flower, petals dissolving into muck. Obviously I didn’t expect to understand the story, but the sense of aesthetic collapse was stark. The start and end of Cerebrus barely look like they were created by the same species, let alone the same human!

Even in the early issues, Dave Sim isn’t an amazing writer. I noticed this in the letters of introduction: Deni Loubert’s will be fun and witty and engaging…but then I turn the page, and crash at high velocity into an ENDLESS BLATHERING TEXTWALL that I kind of bounce off. I’m sure Dave sharpens up after a few volumes, but I’m not looking forward to his Torah exegesis.

You’ve mentioned anime several times. Cerebus is also seen as an influential early work in the furry fandom (along with other culturejamming “comix” like Fritz the Cat and Omaha the Cat Dancer). Ironic, given Dave’s stance on gay people, that furries later became possibly the gayest subculture of all. (“By and large, furries are bi and large”—Eric Blumrich).

“The world, or the further-right parts of it, have moved closer to Sim, and one of the questions I had sitting down to re-read Cerebus is “how come this guy hasn’t become a cult figure on the alt-right?”. Reading it sorted that one out: Sim’s views on gender and politics are ordinary enough in those circles, but his religious convictions are intense and bizarre and inseparable from anything else he thinks, worlds away from the convenient surface performances that pass for faith on much of the right, and grossly heretical to anyone who does believe.”

Well, there’s also the paradox at the heart of extremist movements. The worst thing you can do is ACTUALLY BELIEVE.

The ones who rise to the top tend to be grifters and carpetbaggers. People with no real ideological attachment to the cause, but who have glommed onto it as a way to raise their own status. (Example: one of the main figures of the GamerGate movement was Milo Yiannopolis, who a year previously had tweeted that men who play videogames are losers.)

The grifter’s strength lies in knowing when to backpedal, when to apologize, when to moderate their words and behavior. They have rabbit ears to how they (and their movement) are perceived by outsiders, and are willing to pull things back to the center (at least on a shallow rhetorical level). They play the game.

Dave Sim does not play the game. He doesn’t think it’s a game at all. He’s on a holy quest to share the truth which supersedes all politics and optics. He either doesn’t know how repellant he looks or doesn’t care.

Hardcore culture-warriors of every stripe—Ayn Rand, Andrea Dworkin, Kellie-Jay Keen—often end up as pariahs in their own movements. Their charisma and force of will gets bums onto pews, but eventually, they bog the movement down, jamming it up with their unwillingness to compromise. Not that Dave Sim is necessarily on a level with those people (he’s not charismatic), but the same principal applies.

I mostly stand by that, although Milo Yiannopolis did not call gamers losers, he said “Few things are more embarrassing than grown men getting over-excited about video games”. I have unalived myself in Minecraft for this error.

But I also deleted the latter half of my comment, because I wasn’t sure how it would be received.

One of Ewing’s recurrent points is that Sim’s “madness”, when verbalized, sounds like standard cant for parts of the extreme right. There is some truth to that. But that doesn’t mean Sim also isn’t mad. It is not true that being mad gives you a unique and interesting perspective on life. Often the opposite is the case.

We have this cultural idea of mad people that isn’t true to reality. Louis Wain drew cute cats. As his schizophrenia advanced, the cats become distorted and twisted, resembling owls and hyenas and demons, before finally becoming abstract detonations of light. (Or so goes the story. Much of Wain’s work is undated and often nobody knows when a certain illustration is from.) Madness, like what happened to Bowie in 1976, gets seen as a kind of kind of gnostic initiation. Sane people have a locked door at the back of their minds, leading to worlds undreamed. Madness turns the key.

But that’s not how to works. In reality, mad people are usually the dullest people you will ever meet. They waste their lives retweeting political slogans on Twitter. They tumble down into predictable conspiracist obsessions. They end up as hollow spaces, filled with wind, chanted slogans, and fragmenting memories. They are tragic, but also boring and tedious.

Obviously it’s not the job of mentally ill people to be entertaining. That’s offensive—they’re not zoo animals. But there’s a stark difference between madness as popularly portrayed and madness as it truly exists. I dislike the pop cultural idea that mad people are “gifted” or have some creative spark denied to sane people. Madness isn’t creative freedom, it’s chains.

My father suffered a slow and hideous decline. He spent his final days nearly catatonic, watching Yes Minister DVDs. Occasionally he’d enter a manic state and “clean the house” (frantically strew rubbish everywhere, and then leave it like that until someone else tidied the mess.) When he stopped taking his medicine he did things that were embarrassing and out of character. At one point, he asked me to copyedit his autobiography. I agreed, and he he emailed me a few pages of rambling nonsense that trailed off mid-sentence. I found the document heartbreaking, and although I have kept it, I still wonder why I did. There is nothing of my father in that document. I am preserving some scrambled words that could have been generated by a Markov chain. In any meaningful sense, my dad died before he wrote it.

Sometimes crazy people are interesting (I know some), but they are not the plurality. Madness (on the whole), is “an empty head thinking as hard as it can.”