Good morning, John.

I'm kind of a sidelines fan of a very complicated, competitive card game that I started playing in the '90s called Magic: The Gathering. I don't really understand it anymore, but I do watch people play it on YouTube and I kind of follow Magic news. And one thing about Magic is that each card since the game was created in the 1990s has featured a piece of art created by a human artist. And that's created like a strong and interesting relationship between artists who make fantasy art and the company that makes this game. Because of that, this company—which is now inside of other larger companies, of course—has said that they will never use AI generated images as art for cards.

Recently, the Magic: The Gathering Twitter account posted this image featuring reprints of some of the cards talking about how great they look, and I agree, they do look great. But the focus immediately shifted to the background image, which if you know very much about images created by generative AI, this looks like that. Somewhat wildly, the Twitter account then doubled down saying, "No, this is definitely made by a human. We promise," which is like weird because that means that somebody looked at this and they were like, "Yeah, that seems like it was made by a person"? So for whichever person that was and also everybody else who might be interested, let's take a quick look at how you might be able to identify an image that was created by generative AI.

I really just have three simple steps. Number one: Look at the image and think about how it would have been created. Is this a photograph? Is it a 3D model? Is it a digital painting? If this was a world before generative AI, I would have been forced to think that this must be a composition of one or more photos along with possibly some stock photographs. Also, maybe likely some digital painting in the background, but who knows. A lot of things are possible. Maybe it was made for some other reason and then repurposed for this, whatever. Step two: Don't look at the image as a whole. Look at little bits close up. Why are these little things coming out of this thing? What is going on with these lamps? Do they have two sets of filaments? Why do they kind of blend into each other? These wires make no sense and the gauge, yes, the gauge, AI is currently terrible at letters and numbers, but these are super crisp, except like over here where they are not. Almost like the gauge was super messed up and then someone photoshopped a real gauge on top of it. And oh my gosh, look. After a quick reverse image search, I found the exact gauge that was used to do that. But the final step, and I think the most important one, is to recognize that none of this matters.

It doesn't matter for two reasons. First, because these models are just going to keep getting better and whatever tricks you're using right now to figure out if an image is created by artificial intelligence, you will not be able to use those tricks in even one year. But the second reason it doesn't matter is the more important one, and it is that we are not going to closely scrutinize each one of the hundreds of images that we come across every day. Now, we do scrutinize something when it raises a red flag and there are a few reasons why that might happen. It might kind of look like AI art to us because we've seen a lot of previous AI art and then we might look closer. We might scrutinize it because Magic: The Gathering is owned by Hasbro now and we don't really trust them with the thing that we have loved since 1995. But often times, no flags go up and you just accept it. Like, this was the story of the Puffer Pope. Yeah, if you look close, his chain disappears, his glasses are all messed up, he's holding like a syrup bag, but at a glance, that just looks like the Pope in a custom puffy coat. Now if you think about the pope a lot, you're going to think to yourself, "That doesn't seem like something the Pope would do," but most people don't think about the Pope a lot so we don't know what he would do. It just looks like a funny thing and then we move on with our day.

The question of the modern day is not whether we can figure something out once we choose to scrutinize it. The question is when and why do we choose to scrutinize things? Which, if we vibe with it in whatever way, we generally choose to not do and that's not just an AI image generation problem, that's an everything problem. The Magic: The Gathering Twitter account later confirmed my suspicion, which is that they had trusted a vendor who had told them that it was not generated by AI, but it was. And if you're wondering why this was such a big deal to a lot of people, there are a lot of reasons that I am more and more convinced by that despite the fact that AI image generators are super cool and fun to use, they are not necessarily like going to be a good thing—at least the way they're currently operating for the most part. I don't have time to get into it right now, but I would like to maybe get into it in a future video because it is, I think, both fascinating and important.

John, I'll see you on Tuesday.

In the 24 hours since I recorded the first part of this video, the temperature in Missoula has dropped from like 30° to -11, and that's why I'm dressed like this now. But, I wanted to do a quick message for anybody who might have $500 or more to donate to Make The World Better and you also want to amplify the impact of that donation because right now, the Project for Awesome matching fund is open and it closes in about a month. During the Project for Awesome, we have a system where every time someone donates a dollar then another dollar gets donated from the matching fund. And we build that fund up from people who have enough extra money to donate a substantial amount.

So if you have $500 or more to contribute to that effort, there's a link in the description. And I'll have a bunch more information about the Project for Awesome for you next week 'cause things are going to be a little bit different this year—not like a huge amount—but enough that I'd like to talk about it in a video.

And I'm going to be in Los Angeles next week and I'd tell you about all the places I'm going to be, but everything has sold out. Thank you. I can't wait to see everybody who comes out to the shows.

John, I already said that.