Montana Photographers Now Required to Prove Elk Is Real
A growing crisis in the Montana outdoor photography community has reached what experts are calling “an epistemological tipping point,” as artificial intelligence image generators become sophisticated enough to produce fake elk photos that are, by all measurable standards, indistinguishable from actual elk.
“We are now living in a post-elk-verification society,” said Dr. Randall Furman, associate professor of Visual Ecology at Montana State University, during a Thursday lecture attended by 11 people and one student who was clearly asleep. “If you cannot prove the elk is real, the elk may as well not exist. This is Descartes’ nightmare.”