To create the side-by-side images that accompany contributor Allen Murabayashi’s essay below, we asked the six photographers who won 2023 吃瓜黑料 Photography Awards to describe their photos in a few sentences to someone who can’t see the image. With their permission, we fed their descriptions into a popular AI image generator. The results, shown alongside the originals, are based on this single prompt. — The Editors In 2012, footage of an endangered Bengal tiger marooned in a lifeboat captivated moviegoers. Ang Lee’s Life of Pi adaptation was clearly fiction, but many viewers didn’t realize that the majority of tiger shots were computer-generated. Hundreds of artists worked for years to create the cutting-edge visual effects. A decade later, a photographer’s stunning images of an elusive snow leopard near Mount Everest went viral. When media covered the work uncritically, Alpine Mag’s experts revealed some of the images as composites—carefully stitched...