AI Slop - Landscape Photography Edition

Facebook's algorithm suggested a post from this page on my feed today, and upon clicking through, seems like all their posts are of gorgeous landscapes, but I couldn't shake the feeling that there is something a bit 'off' about them. All posts have exactly 4 images of the same spot or subject, with slight variations on angle, lighting, etc. The descriptions are brief, with no credit to any photographer, or details on how it was captured. I'm not linking to the page or any of the posts directly as I do not wish to contribute to their engagement stats, but you will be able to use Facebook's search to find it easily if you wish to inspect them further.

But even when I zoomed in to look for tell-tale signs, I found it really, REALLY hard to tell if they are real or AI generated. Reflections and shadows look right, focus and depth of field look right. What I don't know is if the actual geography around the areas is correct, or if the flora is native to the location shown, but the mountains, rocks, grass, flowers, rivers all look real enough.

It's only the images that have man-made elements that make it obvious that it's not a real photo, like the one of gondolas, where the cables don't connect and the gondolas look like they are free floating in the air, and the distinct lack of support pylons. Another one is the post with the mountain climbers. It's a bit small and compressed to hell, so it's hard to see any detail on the people, but their body positions and their ropes and equipment just don't look right and downright dangerous/impossible. The images with the train also have illegible text on the side of the carriage, and again the overhead power lines don't quite connect and in one image, the train tracks are of different widths.

As a landscape photographer, this is a bit unsettling, that I was nearly fooled.

This is the level of realism generative AI is already achieving in 2024, no doubt trained on data and images made by actual photographers doing the hard work of finding and travelling to these locations to shoot, hoping that the weather conditions are just right, and spending hours developing and processing their images.

I have always loved all things tech, so I am in equal parts fascinated and horrified at how quickly this is developing. I don't think AI is inherently bad. In fact, I use a lot of 'AI' powered tools in my workflow, for regular as well as astro photography. Sky selection masks, denoising, sharpening, upscaling, object detection and removal, all work brilliantly and save me hours of work, and even correct some of the defects of the image captured in camera. Heck, even the camera in pretty much everybody's phones these days does something called 'computational photography'. It combines the best of multiple sequential shots to create one photo when you press the shutter button - processes that we would otherwise need to do manually like exposure bracketing and focus stacking. Ever wondered why your phone gets hot and your battery life plummets when you launch the camera app? It's already working really hard capturing and processing images in real time before you even take a picture, producing perfectly exposed, sharp photos almost every single time.

What I still can't work out is the modus operandi of accounts like this, posting endless images of AI-generated slop. There's no obvious scam going on here, no links to dubious websites, no offers to sell these images as NFTs, no requests for payments via bitcoin. Maybe there's stuff going on that I'm not aware of, like the admins of the page spamming their followers over direct messages, or identifying gullible users to attempt to take over their accounts through social engineering, THEN turning those into bot-controlled accounts to artificially boost engagement of their fake content, thus repeating the cycle. But to what end?

I don't have a conclusion to this, just that I'm still carefully watching this space, and annoyed that Facebook still keeps showing me posts and images the algorithm thinks I would like, from these fake accounts that steal or generate fake content.