Sharing things with you guys can be a big challenge sometimes in these current times.

I always want to bring you the greatest and most exciting photos to show you the most beautiful bits of nature I can find. But accusations from machines or people can really start to distort what is real.

I’ve shared before some really bad examples of AI owls, and that got a somewhat mixed reaction. Some likes me pointing odd really bad things being presented as real, but some didn’t like seeing them at all.

But today, let’s look at a pair of images I came across that look legitimate, one tagged, likely by AI, as being AI generated, and one that is rather fantastic that people are claiming is AI.

I’m inclined to think both are real, but as many owls as I’ve seen up close, I’m what is call 90+ percent confident, but I don’t know everything there is to know, especially once photos start getting processed, since I know nothing about photography or post processing.

I’ll present both cases, and I’m curious of your thoughts. Many of you are photographers, and while you guys may not look as closely at these pics as I often do, you’re all different sets of eyes and many of you have looked at hundreds, if not thousands, of these photos I’ve shared with you.

From Aniruddha Roy

One posing, one judging, and one pretending not to be involved.

Nature’s cutest surveillance team, reporting for duty.

Spotted Owlet (কোটর ে প্যাঁচা) Canon Eos R10

Facebook has this flagged as AI, which I find rich considering how many obvious AI owl images I see without such a tag.

He states the tag is a mistake, and while I don’t know if I shared his content before, looking through his feed shows a ton of wildlife photos that all look legit and in a style that seems consistent. He has other owl photos I’d say I have no doubts about and are species I’m familiar enough with I feel confident in being able to detect real vs fake photos of them.

On to case #2, the curious case of species that should not get along are getting along.

From time to time, I will see photos of animals of different species being posed together where they should be incompatible with each other. In “posed” images, sometimes these can be captive individuals used to some weird circumstances (the lady with the little owl and the German Shepard are an often seen example) or ones that I feel are more old fashioned edits where images are composited like this:

But what if we have something much more realistic but still fairly improbable, though certainly not impossible?

From Eric Tobias

Well this happened today. Caught me completely off guard and was super excited when I saw it. A Barn Owl and a Great Horned Owl.

And for all the doubters out there, this is absolutely not Al generated.

Normally, a Great Horned Owl would not tolerate anyone, especially another raptor, all up in its business, but here we seem to be seeing it.

Neither one looks bothered by the other, just interested in the photographer. That would seem a very stressful situation for wild owls, another strange predator, and a human all at once. Maybe they didn’t like it, and that’s why we only get a single pic.

He did provide what looks to be the uncropped image,and the owl details are good in the photo, and there are no weird looking patterns in the material of the barn either, to my eyes anyway.

Many in the comments were quick to judge negatively, saying the GHO would kill the Barn Owl, which would many times be true. But nature is weird in a lot of ways. If food is abundant, territoriality can go down significantly.

I didn’t see other owls in his Facebook feed, mostly landscapes, but his standalone website features a bunch of very legit looking owl photos, including some others in barns that may even be the same barn.

So what do you think? I feel both cases are legit. The Spotted owlets look to just be a bit heavily processed, especially in saturation, and the GHO/Barn is just a really uncommon scene, but otherwise I don’t see anything wrong with it.

I originally was not going to share either with you guys, as I’d rather skip something than present something false to you as something true. But I kept thinking about how I really liked the scene of the owlets and that it would suck to capture such a rare image as the GHO/Barnie and have so many people calling you a liar. So I just wanted to see what you guys think.

Even if you have no idea if they’re real or not, do you think I should skip things I’m even the slightest bit skeptical about? I obviously can’t know every animal or all their behaviors, but how cautious do you feel I should be as the one presenting things to you?

If you do think either image is fake, what do you spot that I don’t? I’ve tried some AI detectors before on photos I took myself and it called them AI generated, so I’m not sold on that as a solution.