In fairness, I have no motivation today. I’ll try to fifth-ass it, though…

I think the phone they used went ham on HDR.

Lots of that lately; reminiscent of the cybertruck on fire in front of the trump tower. I absolutely assumed that was ai at first

Makes me think a solid misinformation strategy would be to doctor real photos to look like they’re AI generated.

It’s the almost complete lack of shadows. My guess is there was a very thin cloud cover diffusing the sunlight. You can kind of see this on the right-side officer’s hat shadow.

The best stuff now doesn’t exhibit a lot of those. It’s also pretty easy to take an existing image and do a little in-painting.

The crowd itself looks a little janky. The sky is HDR blue, But then the cop uniforms our blown straight to black there’s no detail in them. The lense is wide enough to give some spherical shaping to the building that doesn’t follow through in the local scene. The patches on the cop’s arm are broken in a way that’s unusual.

I’m guessing that the AI and the phone played with the curves quite a bit, The patches on his arm are just broken in an unusual fashion. I saw an image from it from another angle so I’m certain it’s real.

For me it’s the setup of the photo itself - feels absolutely staged.

Also those police hats look so dumb - they look like someone photoshopped a hat onto someone without understanding how hats work.