I’m talking about images that are truly striking and believable: a shot of Turkey’s fairy chimneys in Cappadocia or these “martian mountains” in Iran. Most of my friends now feel the same instinct to mentally double-check if incredible photos are real or AI.

“People say these formations can’t be real,” photographer Aytek Çetin tells me of his majestic fairy chimney photographs. I thought the same thing: That has to be AI. Çetin assures me that his photos are very real; in fact, he organizes photo tours of the formations. “Everything about the Cappadocia is real,” he says.

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This battle between the real and the synthetic prompted Nikon Peru to release an advertising campaign designed to reclaim the power of real photography. Titled “Natural Intelligence,” each ad shows an incredible image of something awesome behind a single line of text set in computer terminal typeface; a typical MidJourney ‘/imagine’ prompt poetically describes what you are seeing.

The image alongside the imagined prompt suggests that the photo is AI-generated, but a small block of text in the lower left corner tells you the truth: the name of the human photographer, the actual Nikon camera used for the shot, and the name of the place. On the right corner, is the slogan: “Don’t give up on the real world.”

“We are living in the age of Artificial Intelligence,” Nikon Peru says in a 2-minute video. “All over the world, millions of people are obsessed with creating incredible surreal images of anything they can imagine just by entering a few keywords.

“This obsession with the artificial is making us forget that our world is full of amazing natural places that are often stranger than fiction.

“We created a campaign with real unbelievable natural images taken with our cameras, with keywords like those used with Artificial Intelligence.”

Each of the photos in the ad campaign is accompanied by a humorous sentence showing the bizarre type of prompt it might take to get an AI image generator to produce something similar.