Universal Beijing Resort is banning and denying the access of unauthorized professional photographers who offer tourists at the resort photo-shoot service.

Recently, several freelance photographers who offer services to tourists inside Beijing Universal park posted on Xiaohongshu, an Instagram-like app, that the park is removing the private photo-shoot service offered by professional photographers inside park.

“Starting from April 2, Universal park is taking action to prevent photographers from offering photo-shoot services inside the park, especially in the area of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. And the specific action to prevent photo-shoot services is still unknown,” a photographer nicknamed She Ying Shi Xiao Yue posted on Xiaohongshu.

Many expressed their support over the park’s decision. “It is an amusement park, not a photo-shoot studio,” commented a Xiaohongshu user nicknamed Mu Zi De Li.

Some shared their visiting experience in the park saying that it seemed some visitors and their photographers were growing roots in some scenic spots inside the park, which affected their visiting experience and caused chaos, especially during peak hours.

“To be honest, it was very disturbing to see visitors posing in front of their photographers in the park, especially in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, whose passage is rather narrow and their posing activities just blocked other visitors,” a netizen Xiao Tai commented.

Some were against such ban, claiming that photo-shoot services were convenient to some tourists, especially when they were not good at taking photos.

“It was convenient to hire a photographer inside the park,” said a netizen Yi Zhi Chong Tian Tu Zi.

“I usually started at 10 am and worked for 6 or 7 hours at most a day. The price varies and the standard package is 200 yuan ($29) per hour, which is about over 30,000 yuan a month,” a freelance photographer told the China News Service, adding that reservations for the next week were full. Photographers like him usually have bought the park’s annual pass to enter the park everyday.

However, the ban caught freelance photographers like him unprepared. Several photographers posted online that they were barred from taking photos as they were familiar faces to workers of the park.

The ban was for the copyright and, most importantly, to protect the interests of visitors, especially with the peak season soon arriving and many visitors having already complained online about the photo-shoot services disturbing regular visiting and the photography of regular visitors, a worker from the park told Beijing Youth Daily.

When asked why freelance photo-shoot services were banned, a customer service representative with Universal Beijing Resort told the China News Service that photo-shoot services offered by freelancers have always been forbidden inside the park.

According to the park rules: photography, videotaping, audio recording or live streaming of any kind are strictly prohibited, except for personal and non-commercial purposes.

Visitors can take photos either with their cameras or phones, the customer service representative added.

As for the photography needs of some visitors, the park offers authorized photography services that cost 388 yuan, which takes photos for customers in various hot spots throughout the park.

However, when asked how to distinguish a freelance photographer from a tourist, the customer service representative was not clear about the criteria.

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It’s five years since the Asheville Citizen-Times ran the memorable headline: “Bear trapped in car busts out window, enters kitchen, eats muffin mix, skedaddles”. Since then, residents of the North Carolina city – population 94,500 – have become ever more used to living with black bears in their midst. There are up to 6,000 bears in the western part of North Carolina and as their natural woodland habitat is encroached upon by housing, some have adopted more urban ways of life.

The photographer Corey Arnold took this picture with a fixed camera at the back of a house where the family are used to seeing young bears share their kids’ rope swing. The picture is part of Arnold’s series Cities Gone Wild, shortlisted for a Sony world photography award. The series focuses on the obverse of the usual narrative of animal habitats destroyed by human activity, looking at those species that have adapted well to city living. A recent study of Asheville’s younger bears found that they were twice as heavy and produced their first cubs two years before their rural cousins, a result of the high-calorie diet they had learned to forage from rubbish bins.

Attacks on humans are rare and Asheville citizens are mostly “bearwise”: not putting bird feeders out – bears love nuts – and cleaning up after barbecues and picnics. The notable instances of bears entering cars or kitchens in Asheville can usually be traced to a resident habitually feeding the animals, which makes them more defensive and territorial in a particular area. The headline-making Citizen-Times bear was inadvertently trapped in a van after a woman left its doors unlocked. Once released it wandered into a neighbour’s kitchen and found the muffin mix in a drawer. Some of Asheville’s bears, a conservationist inevitably noted at the time, “are smarter than the average bear”.

• Corey Arnold’s Cities Gone Wild series is shortlisted in the Sony world photography awards 2023. An exhibition of the photographs is at Somerset House, London, 14 April-1 May

Jos Avery was given a camera almost four decades ago, sparking a lifelong fascination with photography.

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But last September he found a new creative outlet, one that led him to deceive thousands of people: the artificial intelligence program Midjourney, which generates wild and wonderful images from brief text instructions.

“Soon after starting with Midjourney, I became obsessed with the creative possibilities,” Mr. Avery told AFP.

Midjourney and rivals like DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion generate unique pictures by mashing up a vast back catalogue of images they have been “trained” on.

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For Mr. Avery, a 48-year-old software engineer and lawyer by training from Virginia in the United States, Midjourney was liberating.

He said it allowed him to create beautiful art without needing to tackle his own social anxieties.

“Then I started to wonder if I could make AI images that could pass for photographs,” he said.

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This led to his fateful experiment: He started an Instagram account to house his Midjourney output, without being entirely upfront about the origins of the images.

“At the beginning, I don’t think many people thought the images were photographs,” he said. “The eyes and skin were unrealistic.”

He fixed these glitches with a dose of Adobe Photoshop, eventually populating his Instagram feed with stunning and stark portraits of beautiful — but unreal — people.

More users flocked to his feed, and more of them began to think the images were genuine.

“People would ask in the comments about my camera and lens equipment,” he said.

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“I’d respond with the equipment I actually use for real photos or equipment I had included as part of the prompt.”

He admits his answers were “misleading” since they suggested he had used his gear to create those specific images.

Yet he just got deeper into the deception, spending hours choosing and editing images to boost the realism and deleting earlier efforts that were more obviously AI-generated.

His follower count was rising rapidly, so the experiment was a success.

But he was struggling to maintain the facade.

‘Misleading’

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“It grew far beyond my expectations,” Avery said.

“The followers and my misleading answers made me feel uneasy, and I had trouble sleeping at night.”

He eventually told the specialist website Ars Technica what he had done, added a mention of AI to his Instagram biography and started to give honest answers to his followers.

“I’ve slept a lot better since then,” he said.

Although he did get some abuse – “I had to block about 30 people” – he said the reaction overall was positive, and his Instagram account, now with almost 40,000 followers, is still growing.

These days he populates it with both real photography and clearly labelled images generated from Midjourney.

He said the AI tool has been hugely beneficial, helping him discover a love for portrait photography.

But the downside is that once again he isn’t sleeping so well – he stays up all night creating images on Midjourney.