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@ewen@photog.socialPlease please please don't follow and boost content from random accounts that steal photos from all over the internet in order to build themselves an audience.
It's not nice for the artists who created those photos in the first place, having their work stolen. But you are being manipulated by someone who doesn't even put their real name or face to the account.
And in 6 months time that account will be spamming you with misinformation about Russia or something, instead of stolen art.
@ewen Couldn't agree more. Instagram is *full* of those vultures, complete with nonsense "no copyright intended, DM for credit/removal" disclaimers.
@ewen I only learned about some people when someone reached out to me and tipped off.
How could I do due diligence better as a non-artist?
Hard to answer that. I'm realising that while I can see this pattern very very easily, the majority of folks just don't tune into the same signals that I do.
There's a few image styles that seem to be popular with these vulturous accounts. Usually what I regard as over-processed pix. Almost plastic they're so photoshopped! Then I click on the account and see if the first 20 posts are the same trash.
@ewen I know! But if one isn't attuned, it's hard to heed your call (unless reacting when tipped off).
As I mentioned I had this situation once. Even went so far do undo boosts and deleted comments.
So what I take right now (please correct me if I'm wrong) is checking the account for other pictures.
Looking out for hints of ownership.
I'm a bit wary with linkouts as they could be — in principle — be part of a more elaborate scheme. But hashtags and watermarks should be a good sign, right?
@ewen I guess what I'm asking for is similar to how @cadey unpacked AI art in https://xeiaso.net/talks/2024/prepare-unforeseen-consequences/ (among other things).
That is concrete advice I'm able to apply.
@ewen @andre I wish I really had advice here too. Dall-E 3 and newer midjourney models have less iconic hallucinations, making it much harder to tell when something is AI generated. I personally like using models that generate anime style illustrations, but I totally get why people like the generic soulless styles of other models.
Also when I post an AI illustration, I usually am very up front about what I used to make it, but not any of the manual editing I do to refine images that are almost there but not quite. Maybe I'll write about that at some point, complete with an animated GIF of the editing process and sketching cycles.
Most of the accounts in referring to have a clear pattern. They are putting in minimal effort and just scraping content from elsewhere. So a quick glance at their feed usually shows a clear pattern.
No photos of goofy noodles taken on their phone at the supermarket! Not so many replies to humans. Nothing personal on the captions. Often they use flowery language to praise the planet and nature or whatever. Again, not personal just very generic.
I called out one fella who then tried to defend his actions because "everybody copies stuff on the Internet" and he got aggressive and tried to get me banned on my own instance. My admin blocked his account for the exact reasons we are talking about here.
His view was that so long as he didn't explicitly claim he took a photo, then it's no big deal. And he was offended at the accusation of stealing other people's work. He just doesn't see that it's wrong or misleading.
Again, he's going to great efforts to curate other people's work to build HIS audience, with no links back to the artists or permission to do so.
@andre My litmus test is "do they talk about other things and what they're working on next, or do they just post finished work with no context?"
The latter group consists primarily of thieves of various flavours. There are also artists who post their work in that way, but they're relatively uncommon, and what's the fun in interacting with an artist who doesn't care about the "social" part of "social media" anyway? xP
Alshra 
@ewen I'm sure I've been guilty of this before, so I'll definitely keep a shaper eye out for it in the future! 
@ewen I've always been suspicious of those "x thing every hour" type accounts. They felt wrong even back in the wild west days of social media. Sure, we were all dumb kids sharing shared content with each other, but those accounts took it to a gross level.
And the animal ones inevitably share pictures of animals in situations that ring alarm bells, like baby wild animals in unnatural environments & you don't know if they're being rehabbed or exploited.