Thank you, that explanation helps me a lot. I certainly agree with that core point.

Giving your pronouns along with your name (and any other additional information) as part of a normal introduction isn’t what’s depicted in the comic’s pronoun-circle though. We see everyone just sit down to shout out (and start to argue about) just their hex-codes/pronouns.

Also, I have a hard time interpreting the arguments of #LEG3ND. #LEG3ND points to the visually green appearance of the other figure in defense of their self-identification of a less-matching green hex-code, and opposing the suggestion of the closer-matching hex-code. I would normally understand that interpreting someone’s external appearance instead of just trusting their stated pronouns or gender would be a bad thing, but here #LEG3ND’s (seemingly inaccurate?) interpretation of appearance is given as the more favorable supporting point? The comic seems to use non-primary colors as an analogy for untraditional/neo pronouns or non-binary genders/identities. But then #LEG3ND unapologetically gives a “hex-code” that is not only outside the range of primary colors (or something like standard named html colors), but actually incompatible with the format of hex codes entirely, and refuses to clarify at all, which seems equivalent to something like responding with a set of pronouns that is not usable in standard English (eg a list of 5). So then is the comic then, through its protagonist, deriding the answering with intelligible pronouns at all? Given context, that doesn’t seem the intended effect, but understanding what the author actually intended to convey about real-world pronouns or genders without substantially assuming their analogies seems impossible unless there’s some cultural references I’m missing.

I recommend you let them take it rather than giving it yourself. Too many questions like “who are you?”, “where did you get that?”, and “how did you even get in here?”.

And anyone who plants a tree is providing aid and comfort to them.

I saw the watermark stuff, and I’m not contesting any of that, my specific interest is in the fine-detail artifacts. The apparent leaning of some of the bars, eg the 5th and 6th, can 100% be explained by something like a smudge between them; I’d know because I actually drew up some parallel bars in paint.net, rotated and zoomed them, lightened a splotch, and gave it blur to match. Human eyes and brain are pretty good at picking out valid details from degraded images, but you have to remember we’re talking about the level of shading of a handful of pixels, it does not take much disturbance at all to create an illusion of non-parallel lines. A hard object hitting the tag there would be enough to damage the barcode printing slightly to create such a lightening as would produce the leaning appearance.

I’m not saying that an AI didn’t draw the barcode, and I’m not even saying that it doesn’t have an effect like that because of generative AI imperfections. I’m saying that nothing that I see, or that has been pointed out to me, about the appearance of the barcode provides any indication or suggestion that the image is AI-generated, instead of those being typical results of looking at an image that has been resized and compressed/converted as it travels across the internet. Or to say the quiet part out loud, that those who see “ai artifacts” in the barcode are chasing ghosts, regardless of the actual image creation or the presence of watermarks/fingerprinting.

Can you specifically describe what you are seeing then that stands out as an AI artifact? I am genuinely interested, not just try to challenge your statement. Here’s my observations and thoughts on it:

What I see is the JPEG compression blocks around the lines and characters where the chunk changes from a smooth color to a much noisier square; what looks to have once been much blockier aliased pixels forming the barcode lines that got scaled up and blurred, so now there are distinct vertical segments a within each line, as well as a noticeable gridding on the small characters (some of which might also be my viewer); and then possibly some sort of moire effect from the slightly angled barcode lines interacting with the grid of the pixels and/or JPEG compression chunk boundaries. As with many images on the internet, it looks like it has changed size and format in the past, and it’s possible that someone composting an image from different sources would end up with different artifacting in different places.

Given how small the details of the barcode are, I think they would have to come pretty much entirely from the VAE decoding itself, not from the typical generative AI denoising that we would typically associate with hallucinations, extra fingers, and all the other “classic” tells of older image generation models as well as the less-specific “wrongness” of some more recent ones. So it would AFAIK end up having to be a pretty specific artifact to the actual base model being used, and even then just doing a VAE encoding into the compressed, many-dimensional latent-space and immediately decoding would produce the same artifact, and that’s hardly an “AI” process on its own.

That just looks like typical camera and compression artifacts on a fine detail pattern, not like a generative AI that doesn’t actually know what it’s drawing so it starts making inaccurate extrapolations? What about that makes you think it was done by AI?