There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the cover of local travel magazine Getaway this month. That’s because the magazine – well known for its featuring of high quality, local photography – has published its most recent edition with an agency-supplied, AI-generated image on the front cover.

No laws against doing that. No rules were broken, but it does seem a bit of a poor show.

Local ‘tog Jean Tresfon complains that there is no need for them to buy in their images from an agency anyway, given the talent that is available in SA. And he’s absolutely right on that. It’s lazy and it suggests that the publishers are just in it to get the magazine (full of ads) out there, rather than actually caring about the content or audience.

And veteran journo Gus Silber agrees that the use of an AI image is alarming:

There is a genuine concern among media workers that AI is going to take their jobs. If you are using it to replace human photography, then you are making a statement. Getaway needs to explain if their policies allow the use of AI, and when they use it, they must acknowledge it.

Of course, Gus is also right.

But while they are both correct, they’ve also both overlooked the biggest issue in this whole debacle, which comes as a quote from Ryan Vrede, the head of motoring and travel at Habari Media, which owns and publishes Getaway:

OK. But this does raise another question:
How did absolutely no-one look at the front cover of your magazine before it was published?

Because… well…

(click here for bigger)

You don’t have to be Sherlock “Boom Boom” Holmes to spot that this has “an AI element” to it. And that’s an understatement of note. Amazingly, someone did notice, albeit after the magazine had been published and distributed:

Captioned “Natural Wonder” by the magazine, closer inspection by professional photographer Des Jacobs found that although the image may be a “wonder”, there is very little about it that’s natural.

Thank goodness he’s a professional. Because obviously, no-one with simple amateur skills could ever have deduced that this was an AI image.

[deadpan] It’s so very realistic.

I’d already noted the online kerfuffle before I first saw the cover image, so my AI-detecting senses were already piqued, meaning that I can’t really be a fair judge of whether or not I thought that this was an AI-generated image. But looking at it, there were three things that I noted which might have nudged me in the direction of thinking that maybe it was an AI-generated image:

1. It’s actually very clearly an AI-generated image.
2. It looks NOTHING like the Blyde River Canyon that it’s meant to depict, and
3. WTF?!? Are you kidding me, Ryan? How on earth can anyone claim to not see that this outlandish, cartoon wankery is made by a dodgy artificially “intelligent” computer?!?!?

Literally…

Sorry. We f***ed up. We’ll make sure that it doesn’t happen again.

…is all you needed to say.

But Ryan, with this absolute gem of a line:

You’re either telling us that you’re really stupid, or that you think we’re really stupid.

And each of those options look about as good as the “Blyde River Canyon” on your magazine cover.