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Is there a polite way to ask if an amazing photo is real or AI? I just refrained from boosting a fab photo because it seems borderline. I chose caution because the AltText is generic with no placename. But I'm not certain. It may be real.

I hate the way #AI has enshittified this too, making me suspicious of simple things. Making me perhaps unfairly think someone posts fake images when they may just be a good photographer. Making me feel I must do homework and research before sharing a photo.

@CiaraNi funny you asked, fist I saw your fantastic Alt texts I thought they were AI generated, because of the level of details.

@boab That's interesting! I write too-long #AltText because I write them as if I were describing the scene off-the-cuff to a blind friend standing beside me, so I ramble and make asides, like I do in conversation. It never struck me that lots of detail could seem AI-generated, but I can see how.

Funnily enough, I suspect AI in the opposite case, when AltText has little detail with no placename or personal touch, just 'sunrise at frozen lake'. Bloody AI makes us suspicious in every direction!

• Alt-texts which lately keep reaching exactly 1,500 characters or only few characters short of that limit.
• Alt-texts that also mention an even longer image description in the post. And there is an even longer image description in the post. Who asks an AI to describe an image in lots of details and then again in even more details?
• No AI can produce image descriptions with five-digit character counts like the long one in the post.
• Excessive detail information about an absolutely obscure niche topic in the long description.
• Description of visual details that aren't visible at the image's resolution.
• Transcripts of text that isn't legible or not even visible at the image's resolution.
• Sometimes I run an extra thread with an image-describing log.

@jupiter_rowland That's great commitment to AltTexting!