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On the Separation of Human and AI-Generated Images in CLIP Embedding Space

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Aug 26, 2026 · UTC

We identify a previously unreported phenomenon in CLIP representations: human and AI-generated paintings spontaneously separate along the dominant principal directions of their joint embedding distribution, without any supervised objective designed to distinguish the two classes. Rather than exploiting this phenomenon for detection, our objective is to interpret it: we seek to identify the visual information underlying the separation and to trace it back from the embedding space to the image domain. We pursue this objective through a progressive investigation combining interpretable image repr

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