Why would you go to the effort of creating an AI photo like this, when you could just take the photo yourself?

At a guess: the creator is missing one minor required component for that approach, like e.g. having Sabrina Carpenter standing in his bathroom… ;-)

Looks like a real photo with iOS’s image enhancements that automatically get applied to every photo.

No, looks like a still slightly grainy photo taken by one of the first phone cams 20 years back under extreme low light conditions.
Excessive lowpass filtering to get rid of the noise + clearly visible shake motion blurring (look at the letters) because of long exposure.

No recent phone camera performs that bad any more, let alone an Iphone cam…

But emulating poor performance cameras has been a tool of choice to mask fake image artifacts for a long time now.

Sabrina Carpenter is known for being a relatable goofball from time to time on social media.

That’s the first real argument l heard supporting that this may not be fake!
A google search with some suitable search terms actually found a few unpolished non-publicity pics for me, but still none of these were comparable in any way to OP’s one, though.

when you could’ve just reverse image searched it

You won’t believe it, I did.
Oldest source I found was a reddit post from Dec. 2024.

If you did find an original link to a social media post by Sabrina Carpenter, please share that to conclude this discussion.

I would actually be quite happy to learn this not to be Al!

AI slop.
I said l hate Al slop. Thought that was pretty clear…

Which people are you talking about?

Because I like that post.

Just another reason to have a critical eye open to ensure the things l like are not subverted by AI trash.

This is a real pic and it is of Sabrina Carpenter the singer.

Agree with the second part.

But the fact it is a celebrity doesn’t really make it less likely to be Al.

Quite the opposite, I’ve now seen a lot of pics of her and can’t believe a tiny bit that she would post such an unfortunate private image of herself.

Face in the image resembling Sabrina Carpenter combined with the deliberately degraded picture quality (and the other hints) makes it even more likely to be Al.

Did that in a comment below already.

Here’s a copy:

Mainly the writing on the shirt.
Might be “Seattle” on the top, but gives me more the impression of an image gen model making up its mind halfway while generating “Battle”, adding some none sensical stuff at the bottom with inconsistent font/print style.
Also geometry of the brush seems to be quite of to me.
Other possible hints are masked by the convenient blurry style.

but that is human slop

What makes you think so?

I see several indicators that let me think this is Al.

What makes you think it’s AI?

Mainly the writing on the shirt.
Might be “Seattle” on the top, but gives me more the impression of an image gen model making up its mind halfway while generating “Battle”, adding some none sensical stuff at the bottom with inconsistent font/print style.

Also geometry of the brush seems to be quite of to me.

Other possible hints are masked by the convenient blurry style.

I’m not sure how l feel about Al slop here…

…but wait, l am!
I hate it.

“Just because the source is now ‘available’ *DOES NOT MEAN IT IS OPEN SOURCE*. You are violating a license if you copy or redistribute the source code, or use their prompts in your next project! Don’t do that"

Don’t worry, we will just use an LLM to slightly rephrase the code before using and redistributing it, so that copyright doesn’t apply any more.

That’s what LLMs are there for, after all.

I’m not entirely sure l want to know the story behind this… ;-)

Personally, I prefer sauerkraut.
Complete culinary taste fireworks!

Really?
l always assumed it was for deposing of the dark cream holders after you had licked it of.

By now I am curious enough that I consider just writing them a mail and ask…

Edit:
Just did. Will post if they give me an answer…

l would say there is more advanced information tech in 70s era Voyager than in a typical current German public administration office. ;-)

Impressum would only be a necessity if they were targeting the German market, which they (as an English language only site) are clearly not.

Yes, definitely indentional geoblocking on server side.
Direct access from Germany is blocked.
Access via VPN from any other country works just fine (so no VPN blocking).

Had been thinking the same at first.
But France and Austria did work. Only Germany was blocked.
Only thing that is unique to Germany I can think of is the hate speech laws that are very specific towards Nazi symbolism and Holocaust treatment.
Maybe they had some article (or comments from users…) once that collided with that and decided to just block Germany to make their life less stressful.

I have not seen this episode yet (it’s in season 5, just checked).
Definitely looking forward to it!
We just watched the “Nick of time” episode not to long. Came as a surprise that Shatner was in there - it was kind of a culture shock for my son, suddenly seeing “Captain Kirk” as a superstitious groom in a 50s era dinner… :-)