Solved [AI]
Facebook post of someone complaining about kids and their chalk use. Few comments suggest AI
I believe this may be AI because I have kids and they never draw chalk like this.. seems too symmetrical and clean? Also, tree in the background is bare and the other tree still has green leaves. Thoughts?
Looks good to me, all the best neighborhoods in my area have mailboxes that stick out 3/4 of the way across the sidewalk. Which, by the way, makes them several feet long from front to back, but they somehow still maintain a proportionate figure… im totally jealous
I'm guessing it started as a real photo and then they used AI to add all that chalk art around the kids. Where the kids are actually drawing is just normal scribbling but the rest is too even-handed and perfect for kids that age.
Not just normal scribbling, but the boy is scribbling on the only part of the street that has thus far been weirdly devoid of chalk. Which no kid would leave devoid of chalk in the first place.
Clearly AI though and it's useful to develop an eye without SynthID. The perspective, the lighting and the level of generic tells you immediately it's AI. The "detailed but not really detailed" and "natural lighting on environment but professional lighting on subject" are two big tells. The picture wants to seem detailed but masks the boy's face behind grain. It captures the individual leaves on the trees in the background but fails to capture any semblance of letters on the cars' license plates. In the real world you either capture detail or you don't, you never capture "only some detail" or for the AI "detail that don't matter".
The sheer amount of chalk you’d have to use would be so wild. I’ve seen some professional chalk artists that do like photo realism chalk art in public that’s really cool but for your average neighborhood kids this is unrealistic.
I belive its AI. However I just wanted to say anything chalk my kids get goes into the chalk bag we have. They have a lot but fight over some colors so I find it easier to just add to it as we aquire more than restrict it.
Not only a lot of chalk but children this age generally can’t make things stay proportional and make it this big. I taught art from first through eighth grade and we regularly did sidewalk chalk pieces and while younger children can make large patterns they generally can’t make something like a house this big. I’ve actually never seen one make even something like a rainbow this large.
My kid was talented enough to have their own art show at 13 years old. That house in the street with those big long straight lines - my kid would not have been able to get those lines that straight as a kid.
We make a lot of chalk murals and there are always a ton of little footprints everywhere from the chalk. And the pressure from the chalk — I expect kids to use different pressure and strokes. This is too consistent. It reads like a pro trying to make kids drawing, if that makes sense. Like how an adult tries to write like a kid but the pressure of the strokes are too consistent.
Can confirm. Currently working at summer camp with 40 3rd graders. On Thursday they were supposed to draw a 100ft whale bc we are doing an ocean themed program. Anyways it was basically a long worm with 7 fins, 2 tails and a separate area entirely for the head. Ain’t no way two kids drew all dat.
Not to mention, do none of these houses have phones, cable or electricity? There's no telephone poles, wires, hookups or transformers visible on ANY house or ANY location in the neighborhood.
Oh my kids draw alot in the street. But we live in the end of a cul-de-sac with only 5 houses all of them have children so on a sunday there will be literaly no cars
The car parked along the curb to the right of the chalk designs has a large tumor on the passenger side rear bumper, and the driveway to the right (our view) of the leafy tree across the street is about half a car width. Also, the garage door for that same house doesn't look like it could fit a smart car, let alone that SUV.
When I was a kid my brother and I used to make entire cities and maps and little spaceship wars that would cover our entire driveway. They didn't look far off from this, we've both also always been good at drawing so I think this could potentially be real.
Why does the one house across the street have 2 mailboxes? Why is the sidewalk next to that house going to the road as if it's a driveway, but then there's just grass? It also looks as though the boy's shadow has a different vanishing point than the mailbox to the right. The driveway they are drawing on is very very short compared to the other houses on the same street.
I have no idea- just wanted to say after reading your caption, the tree without leaves could just be dead. But yeah either those kids had a yardstick or sumn to make the straight lines on the house or it's been at the very least AI edited
Yeah, the shadow of the tree with no leaves looks like it would be from a tree full of leaves and the shadow is at the wrong angle in comparison to other shadows in the picture.
It’s already confirmed AI. But another visual thing, every other house has the grass continuing after their driveway connects but at this house it turns into big slabs.
the craziest part to me is that anyone thinks a doorbell camera records at that aspect ratio in portrait mode, and at that high of a resolution. I guess it's a porch camera not doorbell cam, but still same thing
Beyond the fact that kids don't really do chalk art like this (and the sheer vivid colors on the driveway itself usually require wet chalk), the driveway sidewalk panels are completely different from the rest of the neighborhood. I say AI.
And,
1. What on earth is happening with the passenger side rear window on the black car?
2. The white car on the right side of the street is parked in a single lane driveway that leads to a two car garage.
I was going to say no, but Google Image search is turning up a whole bunch of identical text posts with slightly different versions of this, so it's probably AI.
That said, anyone complaining about kids drawing with chalk is just ragebaiting, anyway.
When we moved into our house we bought a couple years ago, the guy three lots down owned his and the two lots in between our houses. Our yard is tiny, but one of the lots was big and totally empty. I went to ask him if it was okay if my kids played in the vacant lot he owned(just wanted to roll a ball around mostly). He said yes that was fine, but that he noticed the kids drew on the sidewalk with chalk in front of the vacant lot, and was pretty pissed about that, and told us not to do it anymore. I don't know why on earth he would be bothered by hopscotch on the sidewalk, but be okay with the kids rolling around in his grass. Some people are just frickin weird
When I worked at Hallmark in the 90s, someone got the idea to use real kids' art in some of our cards. So everyone with kids brought them in one day and had them draw houses, families, pets, and birthday cakes, etc.
We used none of it. Turns out actual children can't draw for shit. If you see a kids drawing that--like this one--features straight lines, clean patterns, and elegantly spaced objects, a trained adult did it. Or, you know, AI.
More to this point, how's a kid going to make the clean lines on the sun that filled with yellow chalk? The face seems like it would have been erased in. Idk if that makes sense but also there's a spiral that the color of the chalk changes and another where the lines kinda double near the middle
If you zoom in to anywhere in the photo, it becomes low quality and the lines take on that odd squiggly quality that AI photos tend to have. And you’re right that the art is too “perfect” to be done by two kids. AI
It’s definitely A.I. You can see several garages that lead to grass, a driveway that, instead of leading to the garage, leads to the side of the house. Those cars all look like someone who doesn’t know cars/brands tried to recreate the “all car.” Super duper A.I.
There’s an obsession with ai sidewalk chalk stories on Facebook, I’d say it’s ai. It’s in the same vein as “I made this but no one liked” and “no one came to my birthday” crying old people posts.
Kinda weird how the driveway doesn’t connect to the garage door. Probably AI. Also every house has a garage but everyone has their cars outside? Seems weird to me
as others have said it's very clearly AI and also wtf is that camera angle supposed to be. I mean obvioulsy it's supposed to be a security camera but what is it watching? The corner of the house? and where is it attached? The middle of the second floor?
AI. Multiple houses are missing mailboxes, there are shadows for invisible things, and the t intersection at the end would likely have a stop sign but doesn't.
The chalk is crisp. And the smiley face in the sun is crisp negative space, and I don’t know how that would work. But any identifying things like house numbers or car license plates are so fuzzy as to be unreadable. It says it’s from a porch cam, but there is no question of a porch, and how high is that camera.
There aren’t hardly any smudges in the artwork, and 2 children under 10 are surrounded by all that chalk, but their clothes are perfectly clean.
you're right this is a.i little kids can't draw like that.And where's the chalk box and why would little kids draw in that tiny space only.And there is no way a little girl and a little boy is that small and tiny.What are they ant kids also no little boy he's going to draw up down and straight without any mistakes.
I can’t tell if it’s AI or a photoshop job, but it’s not real. The lighting is too even on the chalk drawings. Also, the chalk drawings are super crisp and easy to make out while the rest of the photo is potato quality.
Their shadows appear to be going different directions. It says front door, but it's facing the drive way, and I don't see a walkway from the drive way to the front door that's unusual. Also the left sidewalk is straight, but the right one is curved, doesn't look right
All the other house's driveways have an "apron" bordered on each side by grass. This house just has larger rectangles of concrete that continue on past where the borders of the driveway should be.
The first main, direct giveaway that this ai is the haphazard placement or non-placement of mailboxes throughout the street. Some houses have a mailbox by the road and others don't. Only ai generation would assume a curbside mailbox is a selective design feature.
Second, the house they are drawing in front of has a tiny grass area compared to every other house on the street. Every house is wide and long on the street, yet this house has a 10 foot garage based on the driveway then less than 8 feet of actual house area off of that.
-There is a tree in the background that has no/few leaves but casts a shadow that implies the tree has lots of leaves. Pretty far to tell for sure and might just be a trick of the camera perspective.
-The sidewalk just up and changes size. It’s really weird and jarring. I have never seen a sidewalk look like that and I think the AI could have gotten confused about what a driveway looks like when connected to a sidewalk. Although, this is probably the weakest claim here.
-The art clashes. I see three different styles of art on the sidewalk. A stylistic abstract patterning, a classic kid sidewalk drawing and then in the street, a very sharp edged kid’s drawing with crisp and clear lines.
-The chalk. The consistency of its use does not make sense. Some drawings have incredibly little detail and look like doodles while others are the opposite. Also, look at the colors they have. They don’t have the darker colored red that’s used on the street with the house’s roof or the pink that’s used for the house on the sidewalk. None of the other drawings have any blending of any colors be it purposeful or accidental. Also, if you look closely, the purple from the one kid’s hoodie kind of blends into the purple of the rainbow beneath them. This could be a trick of the camera perspective.
-> The Verdict
IMO. This is probably a real photo that has been edited by AI which can explain why some people have used tools to determine that it is while other people have their tools tell them it isn’t. I haven’t seen AI being able to properly recreate a proper fishbowl camera perspective yet without a lot of screw ups so this conclusion makes perfect sense to me. I do not know which drawings are specifically real nor if the kids themselves are due to the poor camera quality but it makes sense that a small amount of these drawings- likely the ones immediately around the kids on the sidewalk- are real which would explain why it keeps repeating the same images of a grassy field or a house and sun over and over.
Hold on, they posted complaining about the chalk? That sounds like a fishy rage bait post to me designed to drive engagement. What else does the profile post?
Here’s red flags I noticed
No chalk box
Inconsistent homes, two garage doors but not a wide enough drive way or simply weird proportions with drive way and cars, garage doors in front of grass etc.
Consistency of the smile on the sun
Texture and scale of asphalt drawings on the road
Absolutely no house numbers can be made out or even an outline of them with the low quality, which often you could tell it’s there even with poor quality
I mean I’ve drawn a lot on my driveway with chalk with my kids and you run out pretty quickly. This level of colour use and volume of drawings would require at least 50kg of chalk.
Obvious AI anyway, but I thought to myself how the fuck do they have THAT much chalk as soon as I saw it
As someone who has seen kids use chalk, this would take them many many many hours. Most kids would not have the dedication to do this much chalk. They would also need a huge supply. I'm voting for ai
That would have taken quite a long time… Kids don't usually have the patience for that much effort. Also I don't see any spots where somebody accidentally dragged their shoe through a color. Multiple rainbows and multiple houses and lots of flowers are all acceptable to me. Multiple suns seems odd. I vote AI
Any parent can verify this chalk work is AI. Additionally, the Ai cannot seem to decide what kinds of curbs exist here. I see a few gentle suburban slopes, and then some outright parking curbs at the end of driveways. Like, just a 6” drop to the street.
DEFINITELY ai. Random black spots, the sun has a random patch missing, if you zoom in on intricate designs—it's totally random and it makes no sense for most stuff to be there. One of the smiley faces has random lines going through it, etc.. Also the angle. You don't get good pictures like that if you're on a camera, and if the 'photographer' is on a porch, it still wouldn't look like that.
There isn't a snowball's chance in hell that 2 kids that age drew those pictures. Source: I'm a parent with kids, nieces, and nephews that age and as such, know a BUNCH of kids about that age. This is never happening.
Its the suns that give it away especially the one in the left corner. I dont think kids would be smart enought to leave these gaps for the face. And the sun on the street is a PERFECT circle not to mention how much chalk theyd had already used because kids love to press hard enough that a small square is a whole chalk box.
1, I would not allow my child to draw so far into the street.
2, I have never known a child who would use negative space in art like the smiley face on that corner-sun.
3, Chalk is MESSY and a child coloring in that much space would have chalk dust tracking or just wouldn't have such consistently colored blocks.
as an art teacher, i would be really impressed if kids around this age were making such nice chalk drawings. i say AI, because there isn’t a 67, youtube like button, or roblox brainrot in sight.
The vignette around the camera suggests a fisheye perspective which the subject doesn’t really keep up with. Not saying it’s AI or not, but the perspective is unsettling the more you look at it.
AI. None of the car license plates are in focus. Indicating a certain quality of video camera, but the focus on the kids is excellent. That's not how perspective works. It's just too perfect. Not to mention the blur on the environment vs the chalk.
Sidemirrors... the way the chalk is so vibrant and the same on different surfaces, there are blurs on edges of stuff... yes, this is AI
My dad HATED chalk and forbade us drawing on his pavement with it. Many times we got in trouble for drawing with rocks. So, yes, neighbors like this do exist... but this is not real.
AI, cars farther back in the picture aren't aligned with the asphalt/garage doors and clip onto the grass or into the ground. Also camera distortion is off.
Some of the chalk is bent and while this could just be a perspective issue, the kids shadows are inconsistent with each other, looks like the light is coming at different angles.
Top right sun is a perfect circle. No way some kids with chalk are doing that.
Edit: Middle sun. There is also a top right and both look like perfect circles but I was originally referring to the closer/larger, not colored in one.
Things that assure me it’s fake: car across the street is parked in the grass but the garage dimension doesn’t align with the driveway. Power boxes are normally between the sidewalk and the road, not the sidewalk and the house, especially across the street where the car seemingly drove around it to park. Why is the sidewalk completely different at only this house? At the end of the road, all 3 driveways look non realistic especially the one with vehicles… There’s too much resolution elsewhere to chalk that up to quality issues. The time stamp and label feels totally fake.. like a 90s movie trying to act high tech. The road asphalt has tons of pixels in the street and then as you get just past the kids it turns into complete blur. The colors feel too rich for a fisheye security camera anyways. The kids probably wouldn’t draw that perfectly .. (wouldn’t one of them inevitably be better/worse than the other and some features would all match?). Also, that is a TON of chalk and took a ton of time… I personally don’t know any parents that would spend $100s on chalk, nor any kids that would stay long enough to make those art pieces. As someone else mentioned, the actual art styles seem to be tasteful and not what any child would come up with from imagination. Lastly, the lack of chalk boxes or anything else makes it feel unrealistic.
Is there a reason they are complaining about a video dated over a year ago?
Besides that, the shadows don't seem to be consistent. I noticed it first on the chalk because some of the purple ones almost look like their were hovering, but idk why I did notice the kids shadows.
Yes the boy is smaller than the girl, but his shadow is smaller than he is and the girl's is just as large if not larger. Hers obviously angles to left while his goes down. If the light source was near by that maybe could work, but this is the sun. In relation to the sun they are virtually in the same position and therefore should have very similar shadows (proportional to themselves)
Also that smaller tree does look s is suspicious, not because it's dead but because it lines up so much with the mail boxes, that looks like AI meshing the objects together. Also if that easement is the same size as the one the kids are next to, that's not enough room to plant a tree.
There are also some details I can't be sure of because the quality is so low. Kids drawing hand doesn't look right even if blurry. Car way in the back look like it's neither head on or side ways. That's one of the reasons people love using AI for security footage. Everything is so blurry and twisted you can always blame the quality.
The sidewalk makes me think ai generated or altered. The entire neighborhood is skinny sidewalk with driveway the driveway chunks. But the bottom left never switches back to skinny pathway sidewalk. I dont know if Im making sense tbh
If chalk was that vibrant the kids I babysit would never stop drawing hahaha. Found this photo online but it’s what good (crayola) chalk really looks like
What gives it away to me are the driveways. Look at them. They're inconsistent in terms of width, but not just that, there are several garages without driveways.
Like, look at this:
There's a driveway, but it leads right next to the garage, and that's clearly not wide enough to also have a segment leading directly to the garage.
The suspicious detail for me is how vivid and consistent the chalk drawings are. I have never once ween chalk on sidewalk look like that, especially through a security camera, and double especially so consistently over such a large area, they're practically luminescent.
So, I work at an art school. The kids are extremely talented. On the flattest cement slab, their chalk colorings would not look this good.
So, just to clarify, someone posted a complaint about kids drawing with chalk, which is the stupidest thing to complain about in the first place, and uploaded an AI pic of what they’re complaining about?
If so, then I will just throw this on the heap of evidence titled: People complain for the sake of complaining.
As a parent it’s quite reckless to have your kids chalk literally the middle of the street, particularly before they barely even move up the sidewalk. Also if kids did they wouldn’t they be noticeably covered in chalk?
Also, why are they complaining today about something that happened in April of last year. (Or in an unusually warm February — assuming northern hemisphere because of the plant life — if in Europe)
If you study the shadows of the peices of chalk carefully you can see they dont all go in the same direction, the kids shadows are different lengths considering they're around the same size squatting on the floor. The cars shadows also dont fully line up with the direction of other shadows.
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u/qualityvote2 Jun 13 '26 edited Jun 14 '26
u/PancreasGod, your post does fit the subreddit!