“Viewers are human”

From personal experience, viewers know how hard it is to make a photograph that looks impressive without doctoring it.

And now, thanks to smartphones, viewers know how easy it now is to doctor a photograph to make it look more impressive.

Viewers are understandably curious about “Wow” photographs that they encounter. Viewers are human and naturally want to compare other photographers’ skills to their own.

So viewers who find a photograph to be impressive-looking are usually going to be even more impressed if they find out that it is undoctored with no AIFI (because they know that that is not something that is easy for them to do).

“The more impressive a photograph looks, the more likely viewers are to assume that it is doctored or aigmented,” as it says in FAQ #619.