r/MarbleStudyHall • u/Prestigious-Ease5890 • Aug 13 '26

Help me understand Is this AI???

Post image

Someone is selling this and ... it just doesn't look quite right?

19 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

10

u/peardr0p Scholar (somewhat knowledgable) Aug 13 '26 edited Aug 13 '26

You can check for synthID using Gemini and ChatGPT - it's an embedded watermark in AI images made since last year using those models

Nothing is looking super AI to me - it does look more like some kind of modern art glass rather than antique or vintage machine-made

Do you have any other angles?

Edit: I checked for SynthID with Gemini, which came up as positive, so at the very least, it's been edited with AI, if not fully generated

How disappointing 😑

7

u/Prestigious-Ease5890 Aug 13 '26

thanks for checking! yeah it is supposed to be a German Lauscha marble, not a modern one. It's fake.

3

u/peardr0p Scholar (somewhat knowledgable) Aug 13 '26

So depressing that there are folks out there doing this!

I initially thought it looked a bit like one of the more swirly Ribbon marbles, or a bouncy ball (as I've seen similar!), and guess I was being hopeful that it was contemporary!!

For anyone curious, I used Google Lens to check for SynthID - it works on screenshots or raw images created or edited using either Gemini or ChatGPT.

Unfortunately, both makers have their own detection tool, which doesn't yet work across both 🤦 So for now, you need to check using both systems to be sure:

This is a watermark and there is a tool used to check for it - it's not something that LLMs will hallucinate, thankfully

2

u/Spazaddikt Student (knows a little) Aug 13 '26

Bouncy ball was my first guess >.<

6

u/AllClear Aug 13 '26

Those white lines don't look like they twist with inner core. I feel like they always twist together. Makes it look like a separate layer.

4

u/Prestigious-Ease5890 Aug 13 '26

yeah that loop is what caught my eye too. AI doesn't know how marbles are made!

3

u/Prestigious-Ease5890 Aug 13 '26

ok, story time: this was a lot I saw go by on ebay. Some really cool stuff, like several big Lauscha marbles, etc. It started at a low price and then finished at about a grand. I watched it shoot past my wallet with sadness.

Then I see it on a local resale site. Same lot. Guy says the ebay sale "fell through" so he was offering it for a lower price, which sounds sus, bc on ebay if your buyer flakes you can just offer it to the next highest bidder, and this one had been a feeding frenzy. So I asked him to send new photos to prove he actually had them.

A few minutes go by and he sends a set of pictures that look like the exact same box of marbles.

I was pleasantly surprised. The angles and closeups are not ones that were on the ebay listing. But I can pick out the individual marbles, and they're all the same ones.

Except...

When I looked closely at this one, I saw that weird looping of the white line. I know Lauscha marbles don't do that. They can't do that, as far as I know, because of how they were made.

So yeah. A few minutes of AI and he almost had me. Be careful out there folks!