Nature is the most beautiful ever-changing phenomenon, and many photographers try to capture its fleeting moments. To celebrate those artists, The German Society for Nature Photography (GDT) has announced their winning pictures of the year 2024.

Contestants were able to submit their work in the following seven categories: Birds, Mammals, Other Animals, Plants and Fungi, Landscapes, and Nature’s Studio. In this year’s competition, Dieter Damschen was nominated as the photographer of the year with the photo “Winter flood in a riparian forest”.

Down below we have shared other 21 winners from all the categories, and if you would like to see more photos, take a look here.

More info: gdtfoto.de | Instagram

After labeling photos with Generative Fill as AI, Instagram has gone even further. It’s now labeling real photos with its new tag “Made with AI,” and photographers are rightfully losing their minds over this.

I first noticed the issue brought up by Monika Rohfeld (Instagram | Facebook) in a Facebook group I follow. She took a photo of a man on Coney Island, an actual photo, with “nothing artificial about,” as she describes it. “Props are real, person is real, location is real,” Monika writes. She used an AD 300 Pro on full power to fill because her model was backlit on full power: and that’s all! “I did pull the contrast from the background and the usual D/B but that’s it,” she notes.

However, after posting the photo on Instagram, the social media labeled it “Made with AI.” How annoying is that?!

Commenting on Monika’s post, Kevin Patrick Robbins noted that “If you use ANY AI tools in your edit, such as Generative Fill or the remove brush, it gets tagged in the metadata and IG will flag it.” And the problem is – the new crop tool fills after straightening the image. “There was a tiny sliver in the corner that needed content aware fill,” Monika replied. “That is outrageous.”

This reminded me of the time when a photographer got banned from 500px for “posting non-photographic content,” because 500px apparently can’t tell between light painting and AI/composites. Speaking of light painting, I noticed another example of Instagram mislabeling images. Our buddy Eric Paré had the same situation as Monika, as one of his light-painting photos was automatically flagged as AI by Instagram. “It’s been posted in my stories and there was no option to disable this,” he writes on Instagram. “I tried with 3 images and got the same result.”

Getting around Instagram’s “Made with AI” label

Honestly, I find this super-annoying. Imagine investing your time, effort, money and whatnot to create the look and the result that you want. Then, removing a blemish or filling in a tiny corner of the photo – bam, your photo is flagged as AI, just like someone’s image created in 5 seconds by writing a prompt. It’s simply not fair, especially since all editing tools are constantly shoving AI up our noses.

I don’t see how and if Instagram can address this and tell AI images apart from real photos with slight AI-based editing. There are sometimes nuances between the two, and it can be hard to tell how much AI is too much AI – but it doesn’t make this issue less frustrating. Pratik Naik shares some tips on getting around this issue – at least until algorithms become more sophisticated if they ever do.

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Have you had a similar experience with your photos on Instagram? Do you have any idea how to overcome this?