This is what makes this technology anxiety inducing at best…

So, for yourself, you have no issues seeing the artificiality of the image due to your extensive exposure to and knowledge of photographic principles. This is fair… that said, I have read your earlier comment about the various issues with the photo as well as this one about light sources, and I keep going back to scrutinize those elements, and… for the life of me… I cannot pick out anything in the image that, to me, absolutely screams artificial.

I’m fairly sure most people who look at these verification photos would be in a similar boat to me. Unless there’s something glaringly obvious (malformed hands, eyes in the wrong place, a sudden cthulhu-esk eldritch thing unnaturally prowling the background holding a stuffed teddy bear) I feel most people would accept an image like this at face value. Alternatively, you’ll get those same people so paranoid about AI generated fakes they’ll falsely flag a real image as fake because of one or two elements they can’t see clearly or have never seen before.

And this is only the infancy of AI generated art. Every year it gets better. In a decade, unless there are some heavy limitations on how the AI is trained (of which, only public models would ever really have these limitations as private models would train be trained on whatever their developers saw fit… to shreds with what artists and copyright said), there would probably be no real way to tell a real image from a fake out apart at all… photographic principals and all.

Interesting times :D