He is the chosen cone!
this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025
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This happened one day in the window well outside my office. I got banned from r/pics for posting it.
(sh.itjust.works)
I guess some people thought it was AI, but just a cool moment in my basement window well.
Edit: taken with my iPhone several years ago since that’s all I had with me when it happened so quickly.
I for one, welcome our new pinecone overlord.
in fact i pine over its shining beauty
the ai witchhunt gets a bit silly, sorry you got caught up in v it. very cool photo!
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I remember trying to warn people on Reddit that their anti-AI crusades were going to hurt real people making real art, especially surrealists, and got banned from a bunch of art subs for being “pro-AI” as a result. Actually, they phrased it in far more hurtful and inflammatory ways, like “advocating theft.” Apparently caring about not hurting real human beings making real human art is “advocating theft.”
I don’t miss Reddit. That place was bad for my mental health.
P.S. This photo is beautiful and I’m happy you had a mind to capture it and share it. Thank you.
It's the same shit on lemmy
I was watching a video yesterday where the video author said it was sketchy that another ytber had used an AI voice but still credited the original voice actor the Ai voice was based on, the voice actor also chimed in that they agreed and were still being paid even though the AI voice was being used.
Literally every time I see arguments against AI from creative it's because losing income/stealing, he hit both those and yet that is still not good enough.
The goal posts will ever shift and the rage will never end.
I got banned from a fandom subreddit for pointing out that a certain fan remaster was (partially, with tons of manual work) made with ML models. Specifically with oldschool GANs, and some smaller, older models as part of a deinterlacing pipeline, from before 'generative AI' was even a term.
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Thank you! And yes, I mean I realize it’s a two sided battle. I legitimately hate gen AI and what it was done to the art world. My current career is in the process of being completely devoured by AI and taking photos is something that brings me a lot of joy and connects me to the real world, so it’s infuriating to have both the loss of my career and denigration of my photography due to AI.
It's the same thing for writing. Use a single emdash and you get accused of using LLMs. It's like, no, I'm literate. I read books. Sorry for paying attention in class..
It's the people who impersonate art with slop who deserve the blame for the confusion, not the people who object to the slop.
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I highly doubt AI would properly generate a Fibonacci sequence in the pinecones.
Eat it for permanent +0 to HP.
Completely unrelated, but tonight I opened an app to look for hotels, and it greeted me with a message that I had a "0% off" coupon for my next booking
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Too much HDR. I can see why they thought it's AI.
Still a nice shot. The composion and framing is nice.
Composition*, fellow human.
Honestly, deep fried images usually give me a headache but this one is actually pretty nice. I think the horrible HDR gives it a painting like quality.
It’s not HDR, it’s a single shot and no tone mapping has been done. Just levels adjustment that could have been done in a physical darkroom.
The number of things that confuse people in this image really surprises me, but I’m assuming you’re talking about the light beam, which is the sun raking concrete at a very sharp angle. The detail it’s exposing on the concrete is actually just like that, even in the raw image.
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It’s not HDR. It’s a single shot, slightly underexposed so we don’t lose the highlight detail. The rest of the work could have been done in a physical darkroom. But thank you.
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To be fair, I totally understand why people think it's AI. Between the phone camera processes and the extreme postprocessing, this looks more deep fried than some memes I've seen. It almost looks like it's got a cartoon filter applied.
Add on the fact that OP is trying hard to down play how much editing has been done, it starts to feel like it doesn't add up. If OP posted the unedited photo to show the bad phone sharpening and admitted how much editing was done on top of that, people would understand what they are looking at.
Don't get me wrong, it looks cool, but when someone says "oh, no I just took this with my phone", I look at that and think that's not the whole truth.
Thanks for your meaningful, informed, and helpful contribution.
Of course it’s edited. Pro tip: every image is edited. Nothing anyone sees is raw from the sensor. It’s all completely arbitrary. Even people who shoot film show edited photos, they just offload the editing to the film lab. Someone else is doing the processing for them.
Even direct from a digital camera to jpeg, the camera is performing countless transformations and adjustment s before burning to jpeg. See film emulations on Fuji cameras for example.
The entire point of photography is to present to people a compelling vision that feels the way you did when you saw it.
That being said, this is basic curve and a vignette.
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Welcome to lemmy
I have a mental image of you in a basement sweatshop in Philadelphia- the air is full of smoke and there's a constant barrage of German speeches and gunfire being played over the loudspeaker, broken only by the occasional steam whistle. You take a longing glance out the window, wishing you were on one of the higher floors so you could jump. And there is it.
Pinecone.
r/pics is a massive joke anyways. Screw that sub!
conus pineae divinae
"Obviously" has been a conclusive reason to condemn things since social media began. So of course "obviously AI" falls under that impeccable standard.
Also just curious, is taking photos with an iPhone something people apologize for now? I don't keep up with all the latest acceptibility rules.
It was more to denote the presence of Apple’s processing algorithms, which are possibly part of why people think it’s AI or painted. Lots of people on Reddit thought it was a painting and some pointed to the painterly look of details when zoomed into.
Lots of discussion about that being the result of Apple’s fusion algo, which merges many rapidly taken exposures to eliminate noise, at the expense of real detail.
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TIL what a window well is. I would honestly love to see what it looks like from outside. Is there some kind of covered up grate on top?
Here it is several years later. It’s an office that I rent. The landlord apparently does not care about maintaining the windows.
I was so confused by the image initially as I hadn't seen a window well that deep before. This follow-up picture made it all click, thanks for sharing.
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Since the light is hitting things just right, probably put some random objects or action figures in there to see if people notice. Every day is a new story! Cool picture by the way.
Just as the prophecy foretold!
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