The shift in AI image quality over 18 months is honestly uncomfortable
I remember messing with image generators back in early 2023 and you'd get fingers that looked like spaghetti and faces that melted if you asked for anything beyond a simple portrait. Fast forward to last month, I needed a quick mockup for a shop sign and the tool I used nailed the lighting, the text, even the reflections on the metal in under 30 seconds. That jump from laughably bad to borderline photoreal blew my mind, but it also made me worry. We went from obvious fakes to stuff I genuinely can't tell apart from a real photo unless I zoom way in and start looking at edges. My question is, are we hitting a wall soon or is this pace going to keep going? Has anyone else noticed this specific before and after in just the last year and a half, or am I just late to the party on how fast this thing moved?
That line about going from obvious fakes to stuff you can't tell apart is exactly where I landed too, and the practical move is to stop trusting your eyes alone on random images you see online. Save the old spaghetti-finger stuff somewhere as a reminder of how fast the curve bent, and when something looks off, check the small things like hand edges, text, and weird background blur. The jump you noticed is real, but a wall is hard to call, since every time it looks like the tools slow down, someone drops a new version that resets the whole thing.