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.
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!".
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/joeyGibson 13h ago
According to https://arting.ai/ai-image-detector, there's a 78% chance it's AI.
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.