AI Videos Look Good

The first time I watched Heat, I was about fourteen years old, and I couldn't tell Al Pacino from Robert De Niro. The film was impossible to follow, the ending a complete mind buggering, and I wondered what was wrong with me. It turns out, nothing — the human visual system takes a very long time to develop.

Your eyes might be as good as they'll ever be in your infancy, but the visual cortex in your brain is a slow learner. Converting light into nerve signals is relatively easy, but converting those nerve signals into semantic understanding of the world is much harder. That's one reason why characters in children's TV and books are so differentiated by colour, body shape, and even species of animal. Young children need Big Bird and Cookie Monster to look so exaggerated to keep track of which one is which. As you mature, your visual cortex becomes more sophisticated. And while it isn't exactly common for a fourteen-year-old to see Al Pacino and Robert De Niro as twins, it isn't unheard of either. I can tell them apart now.

The thing is, I went to school with two pairs of actually identical twins, and I didn't have any trouble telling them apart. Twins aren't interesting because they look alike, they're interesting because after a little while your visual system learns the subtle differences between them. These don't need to be obvious, or even describable differences. After knowing twins for a few weeks, you'll just look and instantly know which one you're seeing. Over the last two years, we've seen a wonderful example of the inverse. Just like you can discern twins apart, your visual system can also group things based on subtle and indescribable commonalities.

Think back two years, and you'll probably (if you're honest) remember being fooled by AI images of people. They looked real, and for a while, many of us thought the era of unstoppable deep fakes was upon us. Then, of course, someone pointed out the missing and/or superfluous fingers in those images, and the misspelled text in clothing logos, the inconsistent lighting, and a bunch of other telltale signs of AI generation. I, for one, felt a bit silly.

Two things have happened since, and you may not have noticed either. The first is that AI images have got a lot better, and "telltale" AI stuff just isn't there any more. It's no longer a given, for instance, that fake images of David Beckham have six fingers on the left hand, or that Barack Obama's lapel pin has disjointed stripes. The second thing is that you might still be able to tell when an image is AI-generated. Certainly, if you're someone who views a lot of them, your visual system will have learned to pick up on a certain "AI-quality" that's subtle and indescribable. You no longer need the telltales.

This quality does not, however, carry over to the latest AI-generated videos, some of which look shockingly realistic. Granted, most of these were made by AI companies as promotional material, and we can assume they were hugely expensive. Consequently, it's a fair bet that a huge number of human hours went into their pre- and post-production, and that their realism is at least in part due to that. But some videos are clearly solo efforts by users.

One in particular got me. It concerned a stereotypical looking Englishman with a Union Jack painted on his bare torso. He's holding a Stella Artois beer outside a pub and speaking badly about immigrants. It was obviously ungenuine — the man's accent was ill-defined, the flag painted too imperfectly well, the pub's outside light was on in the daytime, and the beer was in a can (which does not happen outside pubs!). What nobody could decide, however, was whether it was an AI video or human-made satire.

Hand on heart, the video looked human to me. The man's face was full of expression, his body language matched his words and intonation, cars in the background drove on the left, even the shop signs on the street appeared natural. It was AI.

The unanswered question is, 'will these videos still impress us in two years, or we will learn to spot their AI-ness as easily as we do in AI-generated images?'

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