I’ve mentioned a number of times, it can be a challenge trying to look for awesome pictures for you all every day due to unlabeled, uncited, or just falsely presented pictures.

This one was pretty egregious today. Nothing says woodland camouflage like an owl looking like a toddler sized piece of candy corn!

Now, while there are no challenges for me here determining if this is real, I’m sure countless other people just scrolling will have no clue. To make it worse, I checked out the page’s feed, and they have some really good photos that I have shared with you guys, watermarks and/or credit to the photographer removed of course, as well as some things that look cool, but even have me stumped if they’re real.

Is this a nice, albeit highly processed photo of a Bare Shanked Screech, or is it fake? Colors are close but exaggerated, no photographer credit for me to follow up on, so I would pass on sharing this with you guys.

I get recommended dozens of these image groups every time I look on social media for pictures and stories. I’m only subbed to real rescues and wildlife photography groups, but I keep getting recommended anything with an owl shaped image.

Let me know your thoughts on this. Should there be some type of disclaimer on AI images? Do we let people figure it out on their own? How do we keep aggregaters from passing off the images as real? I feel these are questions we should be asking right now.

Would you guys want to have maybe one monthly post of bizarre images I’ve found during the previous month, or do you get enough of this stuff already on your own you don’t want to see any more? I’m forced to look at them, so if you’re interested in a Best of the Worst kind of thing, let me know.

  • @tired_lemming
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    1724 days ago

    I definitely want any and all AI art to be clearly mentioned. But honestly I’ll prefer the real things and it’s nice to know that you manage to find such great photos. Definitely appreciate you wading through all the shit to find the gems but absolutely don’t burn yourself out. If weird fakes are of interest, maybe a once a week or once a month post with titles like “worst AI shit trying to pass off as real” or something.

    Like you said, this one looks like emo candycorn (black stripes) but definitely do declare in title because people have such short attention spans and best not to leave any doubt.