These two cheesecake images look like they were taken by a food photographer, yet one was created by a robot.
This is a great illustration of the progress made by artificial intelligence in recent years. Now, it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between a real photograph and an image created from scratch by a robot.
Here is a little test that should convince you of this feat: the Midjourney image generator has thus designed, from a very precise command line, a lemon meringue pie that looks just like a real one. Which of these two images is real? Which one is AI-generated, do you think?
When this image was posted on social media in early May, within hours 16 people said the image on the left was fake, 30 thought it was real. Here is the answer: the image generated by the Midjourney robot is the image on the right. The most observant will have noticed that the skin of the lime has a too smooth texture on the image on the right, without relief or asperity; there is also a slight shift in perspective between the angle of the pie and the strata of the table. Some crumbs also seem too heavily suspended on the whipped cream. The more meticulous will also note that the plate on the right seems a little distorted in the background.
The actual image is from food writer David Leite’s blog, who has a great recipe on his website and uses the image of cook Christy Denney:
Note that this little game was concocted by the designers of the Reciperobotai site, a site that generates cooking recipes using artificial intelligence.
