[MostlyStable]

I agree that the source of an image often doesn't matter. But while it's completely _possible_ to make high quality images with AI that match almost any style you want, the current _reality_ is that most AI generated images are slop with an obvious "AI" feel to them, that most people are often not looking for. If I can get rid of those in an automated way, that saves me a _bunch_ of manual decisions, and makes finding what I'm looking for easier and faster.

[SkyBelow]

This reminds me a bit of the XKCD about filtering chat comments comic. If you have an "AI slop" filter that hits false positives on poorly designed real images and has false negatives on high quality AI images, isn't that overall not just a positive, but potentially a better positive than a filter that perfectly filters AI with no false negatives or false positives?

[tikhonj]

Not if you care about either the human effort that went into something—which, even if you don't care about anything "fuzzy", is still a costly signal in the economic sense!—or if you care about finding images that are representative of reality. Having a magical oracle that can filter out even really "good" AI imagery would be useful and, critically, would let us do something that is otherwise difficult.

[SkyBelow]

>the human effort that went into something

Do people ever pay for the effort or only the result? Results that cost more effort are something they are willing to pay more for, but the effort itself is not something I've seen directly valued. Some will say they do, but I don't really remember seeing people actually paying more for same or less quality/results just because they took more effort.