Sometimes Reality is Unrealistic…

…and sometimes, unreality is intentional and benign. Today, Ars Technica posted an article with a header image featuring a keyboard modified to add an “Ars Subscribe” button. But the keyboard looked weird: the visible keys looked like this: OPGU↵ LS., OC/[Ars Subscribe] The extra letters, especially the two O keys, immediately drew accusations of AI slop generation. And yet the image was credited to Aurich Lawson / Getty. I figured Lawson had grabbed a stock image without noticing it was slop and then added the Subscribe button. So I did some reverse image searches. And it turned out that the apparent source photo was uploaded to iStockPhoto in 2016 (Getty owns iStock now), long before the advent of modern “AI” image generation. That left the question of why the 2016 image had weird keys, though. Then @lw replied on Mastodon that it matches a Turkish keyboard layout with the diacritics missing. I looked back at my search results and noticed another image that looked the same, only…