Catching the Uncatchable: The Uncanny Valley of Photo Plagiarism and ConArtistry

in #utopian-io5 years ago (edited)

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This is the story of an uncatchable catch, a tale of the unspeakable lengths to which plagiarists would go and a reminder of the importance of asking questions.

The story begins when this post is spotted and a certain uncannyvalleysh look in the "portrait" detected...
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The image name wasn't helping either...
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When the image was run through the AI-enabled face-recognition tool we use, it consistently gave image matches to Emilia Jones and Kristen Stewart, although the portrait in question is very similar to certain images of Emilia Jones it was not a perfect match, something was "off". Also, the framing of the picture (looks cropped) as well as other factors in the post (edition marks in the lower left) were extremely suspicious.

So the user was directly asked about it...
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With a little insistence an answer was obtained...
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And with a little more insistence a very good answer was obtained...
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Bingo

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Enter thispersondoesnotexist.com

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The reason why image matches of Emilia Jones and Kristen Stewart were there is because the image is most likely a combination of their facial features made by the AI that generates the images.
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Opportunistic/Hybrid Plagiarism

It is important to note that the user in question is a real photographer that usually posts his own photographs and was posting this portrait arguably to see if he could get away with it while mixing it with his own content,
it is this type of plagiarists that are the hardest to catch, because being the plagiarized content inserted in a sea of original content makes it more time consuming to detect and also because the duality(original/plagiarism) of the profile exploits the confidence that an original content producer naturally generates in its audience, in other words: a con(fidence) artist.

This is Jaguar Force,
Reporting directly from the Jungle.
Onwards!

Sort:  

That was the most bizarre case I have seen in a while.

When it comes to artistic expressions, we have seen people doing a range of things. I have seen copy/paste to some minor alterations to the original. Now, this is something I have never encountered before.

People have varying definition between what is inspiration and art paraphrasing. In this case, the photos here are not original work. They are products of a new technology. Since the real "author" is inorganic, I do not think the concept of attribution excludes it.

The user highlighted in this story surprised me by coming forward. Well, after a mild confrontation. This is the type we need to worry about the least. As long as they do not present the GAN-generated images as original work of their own, there should be no issue.

I don't know about others, but I have learned something new here today.

Keep up the good work @jaguar.force!


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[utopian-moderator]

Can statistical analysis show that an image is GAN-generated? Anyone here know?

I do not have any knowledge in regards to that topic.

No worries.

You catch a lot less fish if you never get your lure in the water.

Maybe I'll get a bite if I'm lucky.

Thank you for your review, @enforcer48! Keep up the good work!

holy crap, didn't even know generating faces like that was a thing

Yeah, the faces game is getting pretty strong these days. Deepfakes and such keep getting more accurate and realistic. I can't wait until CG and live action are indistinguishable to the human eye.

Hey, @jaguar.force!

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