The elk’s eyes were wrong.
Paul Queneau couldn’t say why the potential cover photo for the hunting magazine he was editing bugged him. It checked all the boxes: majestic animal, scenic background bathed in magic-hour light.
“But it had these weird, golden eyes,” Queneau recalled. “I remember thinking, I can’t make sense of the lighting in this image. And it was the front-runner for the cover.”
An email at the time to the Bozeman photographer received a snarky reply that some people just don’t appreciate great light. Still not convinced, Queneau’s colleagues looked harder at the image. Under extreme zoom, the spaces between individual strands of elk hair revealed a different background than the main landscape. That’s why the eyes reflected light from one direction while the rest of the scene was lit from elsewhere.
The photographer had used high-powered computer software to cut the elk out of one picture and paste it into another. New artificial intelligence, or AI, tools such as ChatGPT can generate whatever-sized elk in whatever-looking background desired, without ever clicking a camera shutter. And those fake images flood the submission inboxes of people like Queneau, who is pledged to publish the natural world as it really is, not as some fabulist wishes it to be.
“I have a pretty good eye for it, if something’s not quite right in a photo,” said Queneau, now editor-in-chief at Montana Outdoors, the print magazine for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. “But the truth of the matter is it’s getting harder to tell.”
That was apparent last fall as Montana Outdoors staff assembled their 45th annual January photo issue, which features page after page of outstanding wildlife and landscape imagery photographed by both professionals and amateurs. It’s the magazine’s most popular edition of the year, reflecting the public desire for armchair adventure and experience.
Unfortunately, that hunger has inspired fantastical levels of fakery, including imaginary battles between grizzly bears and pickup trucks on icy roads, nonexistent cabins alongside Glacier Park’s Going to the Sun Road, and Yellowstone Park’s Tower Falls reimagined as a sort of Lord of the Rings orc castle.
“We put in bold text: we don’t accept images manipulated with artificial intelligence,” Queneau told Mountain Journal. “We can take a stand, but in a lot of ways it’s on the honor system. We hope people will be honest. But my fear is we’re getting to the point where we won’t be able to see if it’s a fake shot or not.”
And what, exactly, is a fake shot? Civil War photographer Mathew Brady is often considered the “father of photojournalism.” Yet some of his crew’s images from the Battle of Gettysburg, such as the 1863 “A Sharpshooter’s Last Sleep” are dogged with suspicion that the photographers rearranged dead bodies for better composition.
Mountain Journal contributing photographer Charlie Lansche has been shooting pictures for decades. He practiced diligently to get sharp images of moving animals. Today’s autofocus software can pick out an animal’s eyeball and track it, allowing him to follow a bald eagle chasing an osprey with a just-captured fish.
“Now I’m doing things we couldn’t do 10 or 15 years ago,” Lansche said. “I can go out with my iPhone and take a picture of the Aurora Borealis that’s as good as I could do with my $6,000 Nikon Z9. It’s making photography more interesting and more fun.”
Before digital cameras, Lansche printed images with chemical soups in darkrooms, using routine techniques such as “dodging” and “burning” to bring out shadow details or reduce overexposure from the original film negative. Today, he uses a software called Topaz to “denoise,” or clarify digital photo files far beyond what he could do with old Kodachrome slide film.
“I have a pretty good eye for it, if something’s not quite right in a photo. But the truth of the matter is it’s getting harder to tell.”
PAUL Queneau, editor-in-chief, Montana Outdoors magazine
“You can get higher quality prints in post-production,” he said. “But you can also do things like mask out the sky, put in a different sky, a fake sky. You can create images that have a basis in reality, but AI can enhance that well beyond what actually happened in a scene.”
Those tools can also create whole scenes. Idaho nature photographer and MoJo contributor Ben Bluhm was recently scrolling through his social media feeds when he saw an image of a mountain lion and two wolf cubs.
“It had this whole story about crazy behavior captured in Yellowstone: a mountain lion raising two wolves,” Bluhm said. “It was really sad that it went insanely viral. It had 45,000 likes, 1,600 comments and 5,500 shares. So many people believed it.”
AI-generated images like that make up about 70 percent of social media content, according to software reviewers at SQ Magazine. At the end of December, Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri wrote on Threads that “authenticity is becoming infinitely reproducible.” The only defense, he advised, was to celebrate imperfection and search out real humans: “In a world of infinite abundance and infinite doubt, the creators who can maintain trust and signal authenticity — by being real, transparent, and consistent — will stand out.”
Unfortunately, the unreal, opaque and persistent examples of AI craftiness no longer stand out with the errors of just a year ago. Remember the six-fingered hands and other oddities that gave away computer-generated scenes? Those software glitches have been repaired, and new tools like Canva’s Text-to-Image photo generator can produce almost undetectable results just from a user’s prompt.
In response, other software developers have released tools like Image Whisperer, a “media verification and research tool” that inspects images for signs of manipulation or digital editing. Publishers including Mountain Journal also use such tools to prove the provenance of a photo by inspecting embedded identification features that show when, where and by what kind of device the image was taken.
People like Bluhm and Lansche already depend on personal relationships to assure clients they are offering the real thing. Yet they face a devilish conundrum. To attract business, they need to post their photos on social media like Facebook and Instagram. That puts them at risk of having their own photos swallowed by AI models that become the building blocks of fake images commonly referred to as “AI slop.”
“I can sleep well at night knowing that the images I sold are real, actual photos,” Lansche said. “The amount of bullshit, fake photography being passed off as real, is frankly disgusting. I can’t even tell the difference now.”
Last year, Lansche found a bull elk trapped in a mud bog on the eastern edge of Yellowstone National Park. After it died, he returned for five consecutive days to see what would happen to the carcass. He posted a photo of a grizzly bear with its paw on the dead elk’s antler, titling it “Claiming the Prize.” Social media commenters quickly accused him of “total AI.”
“I almost didn’t share it,” he said. “It’s not the greatest photo. It’s shot at long distance, and it isn’t my typical image. But there’s a story behind it.”
Over the days Lansche spent watching the scene, several different bears tried to pull it out of the muck. First was a young sow. Then an older sow kicked the younger one off, but it didn’t have the strength to pull it out. On day five, a seldom-seen bear local wildlife photographers know as Big Red came in full-trot, nose in the air, running to the scent of that carcass stuck in the mud.
“He got on that thing like a dog on a chew toy, and he heaved and huffed and puffed and dragged it out of the muck,” Lansche said. “Then he pulled it 30 or 40 yards away and started feeding on it. He scared off every other bear that came near.”
For Lansche, the experience recalled the old National Geographic photographer’s maxim: “F8 and be there.” “F8” was the aperture setting on film cameras most likely to ensure a scene would be in focus. But the most important part was “be there.”
“Sometimes nature delivers something that’s jaw-dropping,” Lansche concluded. “We live for those moments. Whether you come back with the cover shot or something mind-boggling isn’t the be-all/end-all. Watching the sunrise, anticipating where the elk might emerge, showing up with friends — for us photographers driven by soul and feeling and emotion and wildlife in natural places, you won’t cross that line.”
