Spot the Bot: How We Can Tell When AI's Behind the Post

And why authenticity still matters in an automated world.

When scrolling on social media, whether its professionally or personally, as humans we like to think that we can spot when AI has been used in a post. Whether it’s used for creatives or copy, there is a certain style that AI uses that seemingly makes it obvious to spot. From artificial looking imagery to the overuse of emojis, adjectives and hyphens, there are certain tells when it comes to spotting inauthentic posts.

Once we have worked out whether a post has used AI generated creatives, how does it make us feel? Our thoughts at Halsys are that the post feels a little inauthentic and loses some credibility.

AI has become part of our day-to-day business faster than any previous technology shift. From note-taking in meetings and summarising documents, to jump-starting creative work; it’s everywhere. In our sector, it plays a huge role in automating tasks like colour correction, subject extraction, culling, and even facial and expression detection.

These advancements come with some ethical and economics questions. AI processes are still energy-intensive, being heavily subsidised, and there are valid concerns about its long-term impact on the job market. Similar concerns, it’s worth noting, have accompanied every technological leap since the industrial revolution.

While searching for the perfect image to illustrate our 10th anniversary blog post, we decided to ask AI to generate a cake with 10 candles and our MaxLab logo. As we requested, it produced a cake with candles and our logo. But when we gave the image a second look, we noticed the AI only gave us 9 candles, shaving a year off our age!

We decided to ask the AI again using different phrasing, but it still generated the same image with 9 candles. There was nothing we could do, short of Photoshop (Thanks James) to make the AI tool give us 10 candles.

In the end we decided to go with a group photo of our core team instead, real people, real smiles and hopefully what shone was a real love of what we have been doing for a decade and will continue to do.

This was all the proof we needed to understand that although AI is brilliant at churning out content with fast turnarounds, it doesn’t always listen like a human will, and is simply terrible at Maths!

At Halsys, we are technophiles and we embrace innovation, but we also understand the irreplaceable value of human input. Our customer service team understands human-to-human communication and the importance of human expertise in a market that is ever evolving.

—The Halsys Team