Compression Artifacts
Distortions like blockiness or tonal flatness in audio/images caused by reducing file size through lossy compression. Often used to spot AI-synthesized media.
Compression artifacts are visible or audible distortions introduced when digital media is reduced in size using lossy compression algorithms. These artifacts occur because the algorithm discards data deemed less important, leading to blockiness, blurring, or tonal flatness. They are common in JPEG images, MP3 audio, and streaming video at lower bitrates.
What this means in real life
When you upload a photo to social media and it comes back looking blurry or blocky, or when a video stream pixelates during buffering, you're seeing compression artifacts—the trade-off between file size and visual quality.
What it isn’t
Compression artifacts are not the same as low resolution. A low-resolution image is simply smaller in pixel dimensions; artifacts are specific distortions caused by the compression process itself, visible even in full-resolution files.
Commonly misused online
People often blame 'compression' for any image quality loss, but conflate it with resolution, filters, or camera quality. Artifacts specifically refer to the mathematical errors introduced by lossy encoding, not general image degradation.