log onto tumblr

see a cool picture of a giant mushroom on a synthesizer

see someone accusing it of being AI

see OP reply with a rebuttal that suggests by its wording (but technically does not outright SAY) that they made the image with ordinary photo editing

see others defending it being just a photoshop collage, and calling out the AI witch-hunt

see that defense get reblogged a ton of times

look far enough in the comments to see the one person who actually reverse-image searched the picture, and found that it was originally posted as a larger, less cropped image at least a couple years ago, by someone with a different name on multiple different sites, and therefore is probably not the OP’s original work, no matter how it was made

see 1 followup post, zooming in and discussing AI-looking details of the picture

see those posts get buried under more and more and more posts by people who took OP’s rebuttal at face value, decrying the AI witch-hunt and accusing people of not knowing Photoshop exists

reverse-image-search the picture myself to make sure

find same, less-cropped results used on several sites going back to at least 2024

still don’t trust Google itself not to be making up some of these results on the spot, at this point. But also realize that I don’t care and what an absolute waste of time this entire thing is

log off tumblr

this bullshit discourse is better than any “you’ve been on the internet too long!” alarm