AI weather photos: How to tell fact from fiction

The internet is awash with incredible weather photos these days, but are they real? Here are some tools to help you find out.

Artificial Intelligence has become a significant challenge for the weather photography community. Although AI is boosting business productivity and efficiency worldwide, it's making it harder and harder to tell fact from fiction.

Over the past few years, the ability for computers to create a piece of art that depicts a fictional weather event with realistic accuracy has gone from the realm of supercomputers to the screen of your phone.

So how do you tell the difference? It's getting harder and harder, but there are some clues.

Consider the source

Is the photo from a professional weather photographer, a reputable news organization or just a generic social media account?

As noted in this AccuWeather story about Hurricane Helene hoax photos and conspiracy theories, if you share photos from a generic social media account, you may be supporting a "click farm," which is an often-automated social media page or group that games the algorithm to generate revenue used for nefarious deeds.

But more importantly, sharing a fake photo will reduce the social media algorithm shares of legitimate photos that photographers have spent considerable time, money and talent to create.

Look for inconsistencies

Blurry backgrounds are another red flag, because that's not something photographers typically do when taking outside photos. Strange, out-of-place objects, letters that don't spell anything or too many fingers on a hand can also be clues that the image may be made by AI. If the image looks unusually smooth, cartoonish or just too good to be true, that's another sign.

Another clue can be found by looking closely at what's in the photo. Is it supposed to be a photo of a city, but something's wrong with the landscape?

The photo on the left is a surreal but authentic smoky Washington, D.C., sunrise featured on our "Weather Permitting" photo blog in 2023. On the right, in the AI image we created, the U.S. Capitol has been reasonably reproduced, but the Library of Congress dome suddenly has a concrete tower on top of it.

Click here to see the images in full size.

Does the photo violate meteorological principles?

If you're a long-time AccuWeather follower, you've likely learned a little meteorology along the way. When it comes to atmospheric optics, the sky is nothing if not mathematically accurate. As AccuWeather Meteorologist Geoff Cornish points out in his video on the topic, rainbows always occur opposite the sun, auroras generally don't occur during sunsets and the northern lights are mostly green or red, not orange and purple.

Click here to see the images in full size.

In the photo comparison above, the image on the left, generated with AI, shows ice halos that are the wrong colors, and that aren't equidistant from the sun. Even though the photo on the right is more fantastical, it's the real deal, was taken in Germany and was showcased in our weather photo blog in 2022.

Here's another image that we created with AI that looks perfectly real until you think about the atmospheric physics. Clouds don't just hover against a mountain on a sunny day, they need to be up in the atmosphere to get that puffy appearance. If the cloud was touching the mountain, it would be fog, and it wouldn't look like this.

Other authentication tools

To find out the authenticity of a photo, use a website for image sourcing like Images.Google.com. If you can't find the original image, it's likely fake. You can also use sites like AIorNot.com to see the likelihood of a photo being AI.

Want to see more amazing but real weather photos? Check out our "Weather Permitting" photo blog.

AccuWeather Meteorologist Geoff Cornish contributed to this article.

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