You might be right. But my theory is that the “watermark” is typical almost-legible AI gibberish text (it almost looks like it says “Photography” but does it really?) and that it’s pulling from similar looking images in the training data, like when it tries to slap a Getty Images watermark on an output image.
The watermark is noticeably more readable in the Facebook image I linked though, and it does say photography (even there it is somewhat blurred though, so assuming it was actually clear in the original source that copy is a few recompressions along the chain).
The dates of the other sources however are what really convinces me it’s not AI. After all, who was doing good quality photorealistic AI image generation in 2021?
You might be right. But my theory is that the “watermark” is typical almost-legible AI gibberish text (it almost looks like it says “Photography” but does it really?) and that it’s pulling from similar looking images in the training data, like when it tries to slap a Getty Images watermark on an output image.
The watermark is noticeably more readable in the Facebook image I linked though, and it does say photography (even there it is somewhat blurred though, so assuming it was actually clear in the original source that copy is a few recompressions along the chain).
The dates of the other sources however are what really convinces me it’s not AI. After all, who was doing good quality photorealistic AI image generation in 2021?
the watermark is the photographer’s name, here’s the high res picture and some other angles taken from his facebook page