I don't know if that will ever actually happen (AI getting so good it can't be detected -- JM) and I have met people who assert that they will always be able to tell when something is AI generated. I think that's the sort of confidence that will tend to set a person up for embarrassing failure. But even if there are such wise and perceptive people who will always be able to tell, for most of us, I think we have to acknowledge that it's harder than it used to
All of the obvious tells in any particular era of AI generated stuff are pretty much by definition the problems that the next phase will try and perhaps succeed to solve. In short, whether or not we can rely on AI generated content always being obvious, we probably shouldn't rely on that. We need to look somewhere else.
Fortunately, the other things to look at aren't so amenable to being swept away by technological progress because the other things are the very mechanics of the scam itself. That is, the scam is often trying to get you to make a snap decision based on feelings. These scams try to engage with your emotions, recounting some prosaic background story about a crafts person who labors with love and invests their heart into their work … They're trying to engage your sense of camaraderie and empathy and presenting you with a scenario where you might feel that the protagonist richly deserves some just reward. And they want you to reach in your pocket for that reward.
And a different emotion, but a powerful one, the sense of urgency, the finality of the deadline, the urge to act now very fast or forever forfeit some opportunity. FOMO, fear of missing out, as it's called. It's not only a powerful motivator to make people act, but it also tends to cause people to pursue that action without due caution. There is no opportunity for you to think, no time to sleep on the idea, not a moment to waste or you might regret not doing this thing…
And these factors in scams will probably not go away or become less common because they're not new. … it's the stocking trade of scammers. These are the things we probably need to be more conscious of. To try to take a step back from our immediate thoughts and feelings and take a look at ourselves, to observe our own behavior as though from an outside perspective, to wonder if we're being manipulated, and if so, why.
I believe that will provide better resistance to scams than to try to learn to recognize fake images using criteria that might be obsolete next week. This is what we call a heuristic approach -- to try to understand what something is doing rather than just looking at what it is.
If you're being told something is urgent, it's almost never the case that it's so urgent that you don't have time to think, you don't have time to probe the urgency and question the truth of it. … there's a fair chance it's not actually urgent for you at all and they're just manipulating you.
And I think that's the thing we need to guard against, not just to act on what is presented to us.