I have been toying with all sorts of social media for quite a while and my presence on any of them would best be categorised as “modest”. For the first time in my career I have been asked to actively engage with Instagram on behalf of a client and we have been discussing what sorts of hashtags should accompany any pictures that I post. I have been very keen to use something that makes it clear that mine are real pictures. Not adulterated, filtered, AI generated or in any other way the product of anything that would make a responsible photojournalist unhappy or even uncomfortable.

I did quite a bit of web-surfing before going onto a closed Facebook group made up of my peers and professionals whose opinions I respect and asking the question “what do other people do about marking their work out as AI FREE on social media posts?” There was a short but interesting discussion and one or two of my colleagues advised against my initial thought of #AIFREE on the grounds that it could be interpreted as being AI generated and/or free to use. The general consensus was to avoid the letters A and I altogether.

Another of my colleagues did a far more intelligent (and ironically AI based) search than I had done and came up with a list of suggestions that all made sense and most of which were in use by various groups of creatives. Yet another suggested #REALPHOTO which is short, pretty snappy and makes sense to me and so I decided to test the water with the idea that it would become my ‘go to’ hashtag, picking and choosing between the others on a picture-by-picture basis. I have submitted the options to the client for approval/discussion.

Beyond that job though, I strongly believe that having a label on all of my social media images that says “not manipulated, not AI and free from bullshit” is a good idea and so that’s where I am currently heading.

The reason for writing this blog post, however, was to invite anyone reading it to suggest ideas that we can share and hopefully make a contribution to making social media the tiniest bit more honest. So, over to you…

Techie Stuff: The #realphoto at the top of this post shows parakeets silhouetted against a tree and the weak sun in Rome’s Borghese Gardens. It is actually a colour photograph even though the light was so poor that it appears to be monochrome. It was shot whilst on a short holiday using my trusty Canon Powershot G5X MkII on the dreaded P mode with -1 exposure compensation giving an exposure at 200 ISO of 1/2000th of a second at f11.