The macro photography looks bizarrely uniform and the poses contrived. I feel like a sleuth trying to decide if this is AI generated or not. I suspect it isn't, but I'm somewhat distressed at how suspicious I am of cool things now.
As someone who has done some stacked photos, they always look suspicious! If it's any consolation, I recognize the photographer and they are the sort of person who would never use AI!
You take multiple pictures at different focal points and combining together computationally because the depth of field at the magnification is very shallow. The resulting image looks somewhat flat, but highly detailed.
You know how some photos have super blurred backgrounds? The same effect occurs undesirably when you’re trying to do extreme macro photography (close-up photos of small things). The effect would be that face might be sharp but the body would get blurrier the farther away from the focus plane.
So a workaround is to take a lot of photos with the focus plane at different depths. You sweep the focus plane through the scene, snapping a lot of photos as you go. This can be automatic with nice gear.
Then you take all of those photos and combined them digitally, with the algorithm selecting pixels from the photo with the best sharpness in that region. So the photo you see is a combination of many photos.
Plenty of worries if those images are AI-generated. I'll give the author the benefit of the doubt as he's a macro photographer: https://www.nickybay.com/
Indeed, I saw the watermarks. It's clearly a testament to his skill that his consistency is so unbelievable. Maybe that's common in macro photography but I'm genuinely floored by it.
I don't mind it at all for decorational images, but in this case I would mind. I suppose I would mind the inaccuracy, the worry that the creatures might not look exactly like the real world ones look.
Not that it actually matters but if those images were generated it would feel pointless to me, even if I can't tell the difference.
> Not that it actually matters but if those images were generated it would feel pointless to me
I also very much felt like it doesn't really matter, perhaps too much and without considering other potential points of view, that's why the "plenty of worries" seemed so strange to me. How could you experience plenty of worry over an internet site being disingenuous about facts or images? You'd be freaking out all the time. But I can see now that it could be serious for some people in this case.
It can matter to you without it being a grand philosophical, ethical or commercial concern.
That's where I'm at with this stuff, and I think I am in good company.
The image represents a facsimile of seeing the real world with my own eyes, which an AI image does not. That is important to me in this context, that of learning about the real world by literally observing it.
If that's all it takes then cnn.com or foxnews.com must be excruciatingly worrying. It's worse than AI imagery. There are people who are knowingly distributing misinformation, and sometimes being paid to do so.
I think something that's at play here is that the site looks like it is meant to be authoritative and genuine, and could be unexpectedly deceptive, while many other sites are expected to be deceptive and that is accepted and doesn't cause plenty of worry. Kind of strange though. A random internet site might have some fake images on it, which causes plenty of worry, but we're okay being lied to 24/7 by official channels. Or maybe we're plenty worried about that too? Doesn't seem like people are plenty worried about it.
In my own experience, whenever I detect something AI generated I lose the ability to evaluate how much I can "trust" something. Compare an article on Medium with a published book on the same topic; both are human-originated but the substance of one implies authority, quality etc. Generating a website and pictures with AI requires very little effort and care, and I have no interest in carelessness. Like most humans, I can't help but evaluate the author alongside the art.
It's not the Encyclopædia Britannica. I could see if this site was expected to be source or reference material as you suggest. Maybe I'm missing something and it's supposed to be authoritative. But I don't see why someone would be full of worry that a random web site on the internet is posting information that may or may not be accurate. Happens all the time.
Thanks for the explanation. I honestly wasn't sure what could be causing "plenty of worries" in this context. At least now I know what the issue might be.
This is lovely. My daughter's in grammar school, and keeps bringing them home. She now has the site open on my iPad, and is drawing them. Thank you for sharing this!
My youngest is 14, and she still brings them home. After it rains I'm "banned" from the front door because I'm "too clumsy". Future entomologists unite!
This brings me back to when the internet was full of sites like this. Small artful projects that had no goal but to teach us a tidbit about a niche topic, just because someone cared enough to share it. The internet felt smaller and more intimate than it does now in this era of social media. Bookmarked, will without a doubt explore every inch of that site.
I worked with a woman who kept isopods as pets. She had a little terrarium at work with all sorts of breeds of isopods. That's where I learned you could buy isopods online.
Nicky Bay is incredibly talented and prolific, my favourite macro photographer by far! Big fan of his spider photography, there are many cases where the only high-quality pics of some species will be his. I'm not as deep in the isopod world but this looks like an invaluable resource for people trying to ID + explore them.
Too many comments about AI and not enough fun facts about isopods! Can anyone tell me more about them? How do their eyes work? They look like blackberries in a lot of the species.
That means that they are made of thousands of small eyes, named ommatidia, each of which detects the light coming from a certain direction, so that all together can provide an image. Each small bump that you see on the surface of their blackberry-like eyes is one of the small eyes, i.e. one of the ommatidia.
Each of the ommatidia is a long tube, having at the interior end one or more photoreceptors. The length of the tube ensures that only the light coming from a direction parallel to the axis of the tube can reach the photoreceptors, instead of being absorbed by the walls of the tube.
In the photographs, it can be seen that even the species that are otherwise mostly transparent have black eyes, or at least eyes of a dark color. This is a requirement for any kind of eye, because in order to detect light it must absorb it. So in many animals where the eyes may not have a more obvious structure they can still be recognized by being black or at least dark spots.
In most compound eyes each of the ommatidia corresponds with 1 pixel of the image that they see, so the number of pixels in an image is only of a few thousands, thus they have poor angular resolution in comparison with vertebrates or cephalopods.
There are compound eyes where several ommatidia correspond to a single pixel, trading off angular resolution for a greater sensitivity in low light, or where each of the ommatidia corresponds to several pixels, because it contains a small lens that can separate the light coming from different directions, projecting it on distinct photoreceptors.
If the photography was mediocre, nobody would accuse it of being AI, but because it's the flawless photography of a true professional, suddenly it's highly suspect.
TIL about isopod "nuptial rides". These may go for "many days". Yes, other males may try and dislodge so riders beware. In sum, nature can be vulgar and very few species get a break when it comes to love life.
I'm confused. Should I be seeing something on this site?
From the comments, there are apparently supposed to be amazing photos. But I see text, I see black backgrounds, but no photos--none at all. Neither on Firefox, nor on Chrome. Just empty boxes where say "Amber Ducky" should be.
Only the terrestrial ones. Sea isopods are a different planet (see Bathynomus).
The kangaroos from the invertebrate world. This group contains one infamous taxonomic troll move, when an English decided to name several different genus with anagrams. So everybody now needs to remember the differences between Nerocila, Cirolana, Conilera, Rocinela, Anilocra and Olencira. All because he wanted to impress a woman called Caroline. To add insult to the crime he created also Livoneca, that everybody was (wrongly) calling Lironeca, just because exceptions are annoying to remember. The joke was expanded by a second taxonomist later with Renocila and in 1990 a third author created Creniola and Norileca. I would wish to strangle all of then with my own hands. Slowly.
There are several different, sometimes overlapping markets for them.
Reptile and amphibian keepers use them, along with live plants, to set up a bioactive tank that is relatively self-cleaning and self-maintaining.
Keepers of very small reptiles sometimes maintain colonies as feeder insects.
And still others skip the scaly middlemen and keep isopods as pets. They can get hilariously expensive. Just a couple of years ago, rubber duckies (featured on this site) used to be $90 a pop due to their rarity and difficulty in keeping them. Since they exploded in popularity, however, they're a much more reasonable^1 $15 a head or so.
As much as the website looks nice, the design looks AI generated - image loading animations, or quotation marks for species names. (Both are needles decorations.)
Not at all! Decorations are needed for lots of things. For example, obviously decorations are needed for decorating. Successful sexual posturing in some birds requires large, decorative body parts like feathers or crests.
The macro photography looks bizarrely uniform and the poses contrived. I feel like a sleuth trying to decide if this is AI generated or not. I suspect it isn't, but I'm somewhat distressed at how suspicious I am of cool things now.
As someone who has done some stacked photos, they always look suspicious! If it's any consolation, I recognize the photographer and they are the sort of person who would never use AI!
>I recognize the photographer and they are the sort of person who would never use AI!
That is exactly what an AI Bot would say XDXD
What does "stacked" mean in this context?
You take multiple pictures at different focal points and combining together computationally because the depth of field at the magnification is very shallow. The resulting image looks somewhat flat, but highly detailed.
You know how some photos have super blurred backgrounds? The same effect occurs undesirably when you’re trying to do extreme macro photography (close-up photos of small things). The effect would be that face might be sharp but the body would get blurrier the farther away from the focus plane.
So a workaround is to take a lot of photos with the focus plane at different depths. You sweep the focus plane through the scene, snapping a lot of photos as you go. This can be automatic with nice gear.
Then you take all of those photos and combined them digitally, with the algorithm selecting pixels from the photo with the best sharpness in that region. So the photo you see is a combination of many photos.
> I recognize the photographer
There is curiously nothing on his website about this isopod site.
So.. I don't know, maybe you don't know them as pillbugs (slaters).. but there's a whole gallery from 2023 https://www.nickybay.com/pillbugs-sowbugs-isopoda-checklist/
Here's an interesting article by the photographer about fake AI generated macro photos: https://www.nickybay.com/ai-abuse-to-skirt-copyright-law/
The people who are saying that this is not AI are either being misled or they are lying.
That's what an AI would say!
Plenty of worries if those images are AI-generated. I'll give the author the benefit of the doubt as he's a macro photographer: https://www.nickybay.com/
Indeed, I saw the watermarks. It's clearly a testament to his skill that his consistency is so unbelievable. Maybe that's common in macro photography but I'm genuinely floored by it.
> Plenty of worries if those images are AI-generated.
What would be so worrying about someone using AI to generate images for their site?
I don't mind it at all for decorational images, but in this case I would mind. I suppose I would mind the inaccuracy, the worry that the creatures might not look exactly like the real world ones look.
Not that it actually matters but if those images were generated it would feel pointless to me, even if I can't tell the difference.
> Not that it actually matters but if those images were generated it would feel pointless to me
I also very much felt like it doesn't really matter, perhaps too much and without considering other potential points of view, that's why the "plenty of worries" seemed so strange to me. How could you experience plenty of worry over an internet site being disingenuous about facts or images? You'd be freaking out all the time. But I can see now that it could be serious for some people in this case.
It can matter to you without it being a grand philosophical, ethical or commercial concern.
That's where I'm at with this stuff, and I think I am in good company.
The image represents a facsimile of seeing the real world with my own eyes, which an AI image does not. That is important to me in this context, that of learning about the real world by literally observing it.
The whole point of the site is the images and facts.
If that's all it takes then cnn.com or foxnews.com must be excruciatingly worrying. It's worse than AI imagery. There are people who are knowingly distributing misinformation, and sometimes being paid to do so.
I think something that's at play here is that the site looks like it is meant to be authoritative and genuine, and could be unexpectedly deceptive, while many other sites are expected to be deceptive and that is accepted and doesn't cause plenty of worry. Kind of strange though. A random internet site might have some fake images on it, which causes plenty of worry, but we're okay being lied to 24/7 by official channels. Or maybe we're plenty worried about that too? Doesn't seem like people are plenty worried about it.
In my own experience, whenever I detect something AI generated I lose the ability to evaluate how much I can "trust" something. Compare an article on Medium with a published book on the same topic; both are human-originated but the substance of one implies authority, quality etc. Generating a website and pictures with AI requires very little effort and care, and I have no interest in carelessness. Like most humans, I can't help but evaluate the author alongside the art.
It’s an informational and photography site. If the images were faked, it would be a lie.
AI generated images are not appropriate for source or reference material.
It's not the Encyclopædia Britannica. I could see if this site was expected to be source or reference material as you suggest. Maybe I'm missing something and it's supposed to be authoritative. But I don't see why someone would be full of worry that a random web site on the internet is posting information that may or may not be accurate. Happens all the time.
Thanks for the explanation. I honestly wasn't sure what could be causing "plenty of worries" in this context. At least now I know what the issue might be.
Such a good-faith question!! Your colleagues must love seeing your face <3
The kind of site that makes one happy the Internet exists
OpenAI will scrape it and start serving you isopod facts and pictures from their app
This is lovely. My daughter's in grammar school, and keeps bringing them home. She now has the site open on my iPad, and is drawing them. Thank you for sharing this!
My youngest is 14, and she still brings them home. After it rains I'm "banned" from the front door because I'm "too clumsy". Future entomologists unite!
This brings me back to when the internet was full of sites like this. Small artful projects that had no goal but to teach us a tidbit about a niche topic, just because someone cared enough to share it. The internet felt smaller and more intimate than it does now in this era of social media. Bookmarked, will without a doubt explore every inch of that site.
Yeah! It's such a delightful site, I love these sorts of odes to a niche passion I had not yet learned to appreciate.
If you like this, check out Dany Bittel https://x.com/DanyBittel or https://www.instagram.com/bitteldany/. His Patreon includes a lot of how-to content if you're interested in macro photography of insects.
I worked with a woman who kept isopods as pets. She had a little terrarium at work with all sorts of breeds of isopods. That's where I learned you could buy isopods online.
Nicky Bay is incredibly talented and prolific, my favourite macro photographer by far! Big fan of his spider photography, there are many cases where the only high-quality pics of some species will be his. I'm not as deep in the isopod world but this looks like an invaluable resource for people trying to ID + explore them.
On close inspection, this does not appear to actually be Nick Bay's website, but rather someone impersonating him.
Too many comments about AI and not enough fun facts about isopods! Can anyone tell me more about them? How do their eyes work? They look like blackberries in a lot of the species.
Like most arthropods, they have compound eyes.
That means that they are made of thousands of small eyes, named ommatidia, each of which detects the light coming from a certain direction, so that all together can provide an image. Each small bump that you see on the surface of their blackberry-like eyes is one of the small eyes, i.e. one of the ommatidia.
Each of the ommatidia is a long tube, having at the interior end one or more photoreceptors. The length of the tube ensures that only the light coming from a direction parallel to the axis of the tube can reach the photoreceptors, instead of being absorbed by the walls of the tube.
In the photographs, it can be seen that even the species that are otherwise mostly transparent have black eyes, or at least eyes of a dark color. This is a requirement for any kind of eye, because in order to detect light it must absorb it. So in many animals where the eyes may not have a more obvious structure they can still be recognized by being black or at least dark spots.
In most compound eyes each of the ommatidia corresponds with 1 pixel of the image that they see, so the number of pixels in an image is only of a few thousands, thus they have poor angular resolution in comparison with vertebrates or cephalopods.
There are compound eyes where several ommatidia correspond to a single pixel, trading off angular resolution for a greater sensitivity in low light, or where each of the ommatidia corresponds to several pixels, because it contains a small lens that can separate the light coming from different directions, projecting it on distinct photoreceptors.
If the photography was mediocre, nobody would accuse it of being AI, but because it's the flawless photography of a true professional, suddenly it's highly suspect.
TIL about isopod "nuptial rides". These may go for "many days". Yes, other males may try and dislodge so riders beware. In sum, nature can be vulgar and very few species get a break when it comes to love life.
This may be the most important story of the year (for creatures with 20 pods.)
I'm confused. Should I be seeing something on this site?
From the comments, there are apparently supposed to be amazing photos. But I see text, I see black backgrounds, but no photos--none at all. Neither on Firefox, nor on Chrome. Just empty boxes where say "Amber Ducky" should be.
There's definitely photos, check your ad-block or maybe try on your phone
Huh. Works on Android phone. Doesn't work on desktop, Adblock or no Adblock.
VPN? images could be served by cloudflare and the IP reputation is in the toilet (as are most IPs provisioned for consumer VPNs nowadays)
How big are these creatures? If they are larger I can imagine that keeping them as pets is fun.
I think most terrestrial isopods are about the size of a roley poley. There are larger ones but I think most of those are ocean dwellers.
Cool site and beautiful photos!
Only the terrestrial ones. Sea isopods are a different planet (see Bathynomus).
The kangaroos from the invertebrate world. This group contains one infamous taxonomic troll move, when an English decided to name several different genus with anagrams. So everybody now needs to remember the differences between Nerocila, Cirolana, Conilera, Rocinela, Anilocra and Olencira. All because he wanted to impress a woman called Caroline. To add insult to the crime he created also Livoneca, that everybody was (wrongly) calling Lironeca, just because exceptions are annoying to remember. The joke was expanded by a second taxonomist later with Renocila and in 1990 a third author created Creniola and Norileca. I would wish to strangle all of then with my own hands. Slowly.
“Isopods of the world, unite and get rolling”.
That’ll be seriously weird.
I can't tell whether the images are heavily photoshopped or AI generated.
This is standard macro photography. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/related/e56465d1-86b9-3a3...
Such a nerdy thing to have and so appropriate to HN
TIL people keep isopods as pets. What a great find!
There are several different, sometimes overlapping markets for them.
Reptile and amphibian keepers use them, along with live plants, to set up a bioactive tank that is relatively self-cleaning and self-maintaining.
Keepers of very small reptiles sometimes maintain colonies as feeder insects.
And still others skip the scaly middlemen and keep isopods as pets. They can get hilariously expensive. Just a couple of years ago, rubber duckies (featured on this site) used to be $90 a pop due to their rarity and difficulty in keeping them. Since they exploded in popularity, however, they're a much more reasonable^1 $15 a head or so.
[1]: For certain definitions of reasonable.
Forbidden nigiri
As much as the website looks nice, the design looks AI generated - image loading animations, or quotation marks for species names. (Both are needles decorations.)
Aren’t all decorations needless?
Not at all! Decorations are needed for lots of things. For example, obviously decorations are needed for decorating. Successful sexual posturing in some birds requires large, decorative body parts like feathers or crests.
I don’t care if someone uses AI to get a simple website up. I’m here for their content, the photos.
The photos are all either stolen or AI generated.
It is indeed real isopod hours
This is raw AI slop, easily identified as such the second you see it.
100% generated website from the code to the text to the pictures.