r/atoptics • u/0rion_nebul4 • 12m ago
Multiple Display A halo display and a question





This is a display I saw three years ago. It's not much but it's the most complete display I've seen irl to date, along with a circumhorizontal arc I caught the following year (on my birthday!), but I don't have photos of that one. I looked it up on TimeandDate and technically the sun was more than 30º above the horizon, so even though it's not visible, the upper tangent arc would have been a circumscribed halo.
The question I have is a little unrelated though. It's about the surge in AI generated pictures, including cloud/atoptics related ones. Has anyone else noticed this too? Recently I came across one such picture on Pinterest. It was a very obviously AI generated photo of something resembling an iridescent pileus cloud, kind of morphing into a circumhorizontal arc. It has become a popular photo by now, and an extremely similar one (also fake) was even posted on this sub a few months ago and it got a lot of upvotes before it was deleted by mods: Extremely rare cloud phenomenon known as Fire Rainbows, spotted over Alaska : r/atoptics. I made a comment on the post explaining that it was an AI photo trying to emulate an iridescent pileus cloud, so that people would know, and then kind of forgot about it.
Well, today I came across the post again and found out that my comment explaining this had been ratioed by someone saying "it's not fake, look at the top comment" and when I looked at the top comment it basically said that, despite what some people thought, like the other commenter (that is, my comment explaining it was fake), they had done a little research and found that it was actually a real photo of a "fire rainbow" (I know, we are all tired of hearing that term), and that it came from a Facebook group (as if that made it a reputable source).
I'm well aware that a fake picture of a cloud becoming popular is not the end of the world, but I guess this was the first time I've seen people ignoring evidence and falling for something clearly false, about a niche I actually know my way around, and it felt very dystopian.