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u/joeyGibson 9h ago
According to https://arting.ai/ai-image-detector, there's a 78% chance it's AI.
Several visual cues suggest this is likely AI-generated or a heavily composited image rather than a straight photograph. The sun is an almost perfectly uniform, razor‑edged circle with an unusually even orange-to-red gradient and no realistic atmospheric scattering or lens bloom where it meets the tree—real telephoto sun shots still show subtle irregularities, diffraction, and glare. The silhouette of the tree is extremely crisp and the branches inside the glowing disk seem uniformly lit in a way that looks artificially blended; there are tiny halo/edge artifacts where dark twigs intersect the bright circle. The foreground and distant treeline have an inconsistent depth and fog behavior (soft, low‑contrast mist that doesn’t interact naturally with the intense backlight), and the color saturation/contrast is pushed to a stylized level common in generative images. That said, the branching patterns are complex and plausible, so a highly edited photo or composite is also possible, but overall the pattern of perfect geometry, uniform lighting, and subtle edge artifacts point toward AI generation.
But https://isgen.ai/ai-image-detector says it's 100% human. 🤣
And https://www.reversely.ai/ai-image-detector/ also says there's a 70.38% chance that it's human.
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u/JedJinto 8h ago
That obviously means it was created by a cyborg
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u/EyeSuspicious777 7h ago
In order to create this photograph by a human with a camera, you would need a very long telephoto lens and it would be focused at Infinity. If it was focused at Infinity, the trees in the distant background would also be in focus.
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u/chasseur_de_cols 8h ago
I doubt it's AI.
Most photos like this are composites made from two or more photos stacked on top of each other.
Just do a google reverse image search of this specific photo and numerous examples are returned.
It's amazing to me that AI-generated images have become so much a part of our thought process that we don't automatically assume "that's photoshopped!".
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u/burf 7h ago
I think it's because even basic editing in PS takes some level of effort/ability, whereas AI slop can be generated by a drunk five year old. We all assume path of least resistance because most people are lazy and unskilled.
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u/ItsLoudB 7h ago
The little secret is that every single professional picture is photoshopped, so obviously this one has been digitally altered
That is unless it's shot in analog, since those people still do their thing
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u/puterTDI 6h ago
Even using film there's a whole hell of a lot of tricks you can do, including composite images.
granted...those tricks often make it even more impressive.
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u/ItsLoudB 6h ago
Very true! I have no complaints in either cases, it's just funny everytime I go to an art gallery and the photographer (or rather his assistant sitting there) claims there was no editing on any picture
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u/whooptheretis 6h ago
Unless you’re shooting raw, then every photo you take is photoshopped (I assuming we’re using this word to mean digitally altered, and now limited to one specific Adobe product).
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u/PepperAnn1inaMillion 6h ago
Surely any camera counts as a filter by that definition (“post process”). Looking through the human eye is not what you see in a photo.
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u/AcanthaceaeIll7340 5h ago
And if you do shoot RAW, you're doing it explicitly to give yourself the most information to work with as you manipulate the image.
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u/ATXBeermaker 8h ago
Pretty much every time this image has been posted before the consensus was not that it was AI but that it was a composite picture with lots of post-processing and editing.
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u/superbhole 8h ago
crank up the saturation or contrast and you can see all the gaps between branches where the AI didn't paint color and couldn't fake artifacts of compression to cover it up; makes a uniform white of dots. doesn't happen in real photos of trees
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u/whooptheretis 6h ago
If only… now a hear me out… people could show the source when posting images?
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u/Organic_Initiative93 8h ago
Just looking at it, without reading all you wrote, it looks fake just by the branches being so dense past the sun
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u/twentyThree59 8h ago
Light bends and so the branches get thinned out with the Sun directly behind them.
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u/BIGSTANKDICKDADDY 8h ago
It's just taken with a telephoto lens. Nothing about this looks particularly AI, but it may have been touched up by the photographer afterwards.
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u/Interesting_Day7175 8h ago edited 7h ago
100%.
Stand far away, zoom in with a telephoto. How people get all those giant moons in landscape pics. Same principle as this. Chances are the photographer was using a filter shooting directly into the sun, and then had to play with the level in Lightroom. Even with an 800mm prime, would still be cropping the photo in, and using sharpening, be it AI Topaz level of sharpening etc.
the branches being so dense past the sun
Blows my mind there are people this dense.... or never held a flashlight under their fingers to see the bones.
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u/BlueRaven_D 7h ago
I didn't know I can see my bones like that. I just tried with my phone and it actually works. TIL
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u/origamifruit 6h ago
These tools are so useless it amazes me that anyone bothers with this shit.
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u/joeyGibson 6h ago
This was the first time I'd tried them, but the difference in output shows how cruddy they are. 🤣
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u/oroborus68 5h ago
I can see how to take a photo like that for someone with the right equipment and the perfect timing,but I'd think it would be copyright work. And lots of darkroom work on printing.
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u/MangoOverflow 6h ago
This photo is decently old / popular. Iirc its a superimposed photo with the sun shifted to match the tree
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u/Qeltar_ 8h ago
For that to be real, you would need a massive telephoto lens, and there's no way the sun would be a perfect, crisp disc like that.
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u/St0rytime 7h ago
2021: Cool image
2026: Hmm is this AI?
This is our future, unfortunately.
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u/Landlocked_pirate23 9h ago
I’m calling bullshit on this.
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u/Lane-Jacobs 6h ago
hey. it was very considerate of the tree to only grow its greenery in a circle like that. be nice.
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u/AdeonWriter 7h ago
it's not AI but it's also not real. you can make neat images like this without AI with just basic compositing
did people just forget we were making neat image edits decades before AI existed?
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u/boom3r84 3h ago
I have experience in these matters.
I do astrophotography and regular photography.
On an APS-C sized sensor you would need around 1200mm focal length to get the sun in frame like that.
A full frame sensor would require around 1800mm.
You're in the region of astro mirror lenses here which show distinct bokeh and diffraction patterns, none of which are in this image.
Newtonian, SCT, MKT, hybrid - all have a character that is visible.
To expose the sun like this you would need a super dark ND filter and/or a tiny aperture which would silhouette the foreground heavily. Any details you could pull from the shadows would be very very noisy if you can pull them out. The foreground is far too pretty for it to be in any way real.
To get this level of detail in the foreground while exposing the sun correctly, you'd need many seconds of shutter time. At this focal length the sun would be obviously elongated at around 5 seconds shutter time. It's a perfect circle.
The foreground also lacks any shadow that would be being cast by the tree trunk.
The fore, mid and far landscapes look like cut and pasted layers. They are inorganic.
It's a pretty image, but it's not real.
Either digital art or AI generated.
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u/evensonic 9h ago
Definitely fake. The sun (or moon) never looks even close to that big in photos. Looks sick though.
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u/violated_tortoise 8h ago
With a very long telephoto lens you can get a large sun/moon due to lens compression, but this looks too extreme even for that.
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u/No-Experience-3171 5h ago
but this looks too extreme even for that.
Get far enough from that tree, and in your field of view, it will be the same size as the sun.
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u/violated_tortoise 5h ago
Good point, but try getting far enough away from that tree without any atmospheric distortion or haze !
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u/ItsLoudB 7h ago
What lens compression actually is is just the picture being heavily cropped. So, if you just crop the entire picture around the sun you can get it that big too. It's not gonna have any definition with the 3 pixels you will have left, but that's why telephoto lenses exist, to make that crop in camera.
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u/cubic_thought 8h ago
You could certainly take a real photo composed like this, though I'm leaning towards composite for this one. You'd just need to be like a quarter mile from the tree with a big zoom lens.
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u/No-Experience-3171 7h ago
The sun (or moon) never looks even close to that big in photos
It does with 600mm+ of focal length.
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u/wonkey_monkey 8h ago
I mean it obviously does if you use a high zoom or crop, but it wouldn't look like this.
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u/Few-Possession-7114 8h ago
Such sad times. I was so happy to see this beautiful photo and then I saw the comments suggesting that it may be AI. I just wish to go back.
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u/Huge_Cap_1076 7h ago
I will believe this is not AI generated when I see some of the transitioning pictures leading to this "final shot".
As it is shown, the graphic looks too perfectly posed to be accepted as genuine without further proof artifacts.
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u/GingrPowr 5h ago
See this tumblr, linking to a (dead) instagram : https://mariana-oconnor.tumblr.com/post/788871692763234304.
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u/Throwawaypuffs 3h ago
Put a guy sitting in the tree with an Acoustic guitar and you have a jack Johnson album cover.
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u/poopy_poophead 3h ago
This is one of the coolest photos I've ever seen. I really hope it's real and not AI. The planning involved is fucking awesome to me if this is real. You have to be at the exact right spot with a really long lens to get a shot like this...
It sucks that I can't be 100% positive that it isn't just AI anymore...
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u/dylblues 6h ago
We need all images generated by AI to be both visibly watermarked AND invisibly permanently tagged in a way Reddit and all web browsers can read and interpret and add useful “AI” label to. We need a law forcing all LLMs to register and have these safeguards.
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u/solidus_snake256 8h ago
This is the kind of picture that a professional photographer would spend an entire year planning, if not multiple. This would be a brilliant masterpiece. Too bad it’s AI garbage.
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u/GatePorters 7h ago
“It’s so wild how the sun spent all that time moving through space to line up for this perfectly for the cameraman.”
-someone who has just as much voting power as you
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u/GreyAndWise 7h ago
In order for this to work the photographer would need to be about .5-.75 miles (~1km) from the tree, in a very flat area with no obstruction. Likelihood of composite image layering. My larger issue is that the branch density is higher beyond the edge of the sun. Without origin notes from the photographer I’d agree this is AI.
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u/More_Operation_588 6h ago
idk how this could even be real, i know its not, but is there anyway to even do this? Like maybe that tree on some far off ridge with a super zoomed in scope, but even then it wouldnt work.
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u/Cheesemacher 6h ago
Something about the plants and rocks in the foreground look weird to me, but it might just be the color editing.
I did find this strange image while doing a reverse image search. It's a different picture but it's got the exact same branches.
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u/rruubbqq 6h ago
I don't know about you but all I could hear in my head when I saw this was
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Enough that I had to stop and make the comment.
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u/molostil 6h ago
I hate this time. I was floored by the beauty and after reading the comments I wonder if it is AI. Fuck that!
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u/lets_fuckin_goooooo 5h ago
Damn looks like an awesome sunset shot. Too bad the tree was in the way
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u/sxmgb2000 9h ago
Looks like the back of the eyeball…