The macro photography looks bizarrely uniform and the poses contrived. I feel like a sleuth trying to decide if this is AI generated or not. I suspect it isn't, but I'm somewhat distressed at how suspicious I am of cool things now.
As someone who has done some stacked photos, they always look suspicious! If it's any consolation, I recognize the photographer and they are the sort of person who would never use AI!
You know how some photos have super blurred backgrounds? The same effect occurs undesirably when you’re trying to do extreme macro photography (close-up photos of small things). The effect would be that face might be sharp but the body would get blurrier the farther away from the focus plane.
So a workaround is to take a lot of photos with the focus plane at different depths. You sweep the focus plane through the scene, snapping a lot of photos as you go. This can be automatic with nice gear.
Then you take all of those photos and combined them digitally, with the algorithm selecting pixels from the photo with the best sharpness in that region. So the photo you see is a combination of many photos.
You take multiple pictures at different focal points and combining together computationally because the depth of field at the magnification is very shallow. The resulting image looks somewhat flat, but highly detailed.
Plenty of worries if those images are AI-generated. I'll give the author the benefit of the doubt as he's a macro photographer: https://www.nickybay.com/
Indeed, I saw the watermarks. It's clearly a testament to his skill that his consistency is so unbelievable. Maybe that's common in macro photography but I'm genuinely floored by it.
In my own experience, whenever I detect something AI generated I lose the ability to evaluate how much I can "trust" something. Compare an article on Medium with a published book on the same topic; both are human-originated but the substance of one implies authority, quality etc. Generating a website and pictures with AI requires very little effort and care, and I have no interest in carelessness. Like most humans, I can't help but evaluate the author alongside the art.
I don't mind it at all for decorational images, but in this case I would mind. I suppose I would mind the inaccuracy, the worry that the creatures might not look exactly like the real world ones look.
Not that it actually matters but if those images were generated it would feel pointless to me, even if I can't tell the difference.
As much as the website looks nice, the design looks AI generated - image loading animations, or quotation marks for species names. (Both a are needles decorations.)
That is exactly what an AI Bot would say XDXD
So a workaround is to take a lot of photos with the focus plane at different depths. You sweep the focus plane through the scene, snapping a lot of photos as you go. This can be automatic with nice gear.
Then you take all of those photos and combined them digitally, with the algorithm selecting pixels from the photo with the best sharpness in that region. So the photo you see is a combination of many photos.
What would be so worrying about someone using AI to generate images for their site?
Not that it actually matters but if those images were generated it would feel pointless to me, even if I can't tell the difference.