So if you're evaluating whether to commission or pay an artist, and you're uncertain whether they are AI, the most surefire way to make that determination is to ask the artist about their medium and their process. There is not an artist in the world that isn't happy to talk about their medium. If they're cagey about that, easy red flag.
If you're evaluating whether to favorite, comment, or engage with an artist on some level that doesn't directly involve exchanging money, the stakes are lower; you can still ask about the medium if you want, but like. If you don't have the time or energy or desire to have that conversation with every artist you engage with, and there's some art that you're on the fence about, I promise you, I PROMISE YOU, the engagement, the encouragement, the share, means THE WORLD to the artist if they're real, while withholding that engagement from an AI user really will not be felt by the prime movers of the AI world.
If 5% of the time you accidentally engage with AI art, that's still 95% of the time that you're actively encouraging and helping real artists get noticed in a sea of talent and an ocean of slop. That means everything.
Put another way: accidentally refusing to engage (or worse, encouraging others to refuse to engage) with a real artist based on arcane pattern-seeking and hunches that it might be AI is *far more damaging* to real artists than it is to AI and frankly, probably more damaging to them than AI itself.
You don't need to have a perfect success rate at AI detection. Support real artists by engaging with them instead of being so afraid of AI that you make it harder for them. It's gonna be okay. Connection and engagement is both the purpose of art and the best weapon we have against generative AI, and that is frankly great news for artists.