This airplane has become a minor viral sensation. Is it real? Everyone knows by the pixels.
The general consensus (and some evidence) shows that it's been digitally manipulated by a graphic designer working for the airplane livery people. It costs about $250k to paint a jumbo, so it's necessary and likely well-paid mockup work. But this artist couldn't paint out the passenger windows intersecting with the IndiGo logo, among other things, so maybe not that well paid.
I bring this up because I have a hypothesis about why this particular image is so confounding. It's because it's not been edited or generated by AI, but photomanipulated the old fashioned way, by copying, brushing, cloning and so on in Photoshop. We've gotten to the point where in trying to unravel an obviously uncanny image, we search reflexively for "turds"–the mistakes, hallucinations and other tells created by AI image generators. And if we don't find them, some of us now assume "well, I guess it's real then." We've forgotten about the elegant weapons from a more civilized age.
P.S. the plane is gold, not blue.
UPDATE: The original photograph, by Lars Hentschel.
