A Sanity Check for AI-generated Image Detection

With the rapid development of generative models, discerning AI-generated content has evoked increasing attention from both industry and academia. In this paper, we conduct a sanity check on whether the task of AI-generated image detection has been solved. To start with, we present Chameleon dataset, consisting of AI-generated images that are genuinely challenging for human perception. To quantify the generalization of existing methods, we evaluate 9 off-the-shelf AI-generated image detectors on Chameleon dataset. Upon analysis, almost all models misclassify AI-generated images as real ones. Later, we propose AIDE AI-generated Image DEtector with Hybrid Features, which leverages multiple experts to simultaneously extract visual artifacts and noise patterns. Specifically, to capture the high-level semantics, we utilize CLIP to compute the visual embedding. This effectively enables the model to discern AI-generated images based on semantics and contextual information. Secondly, we select the highest and lowest frequency patches in the image, and compute the low-level patchwise features, aiming to detect AI-generated images by low-level artifacts, for example, noise patterns, anti-aliasing effects. While evaluating on existing benchmarks, for example, AIGCDetectBenchmark and GenImage, AIDE achieves +3.5% and +4.6% improvements to state-of-the-art methods, and on our proposed challenging Chameleon benchmarks, it also achieves promising results, despite the problem of detecting AI-generated images remains far from being solved.