09 — Images

Image provenance

Of the images on this site, exactly one is a photograph. Everything else is an illustrative visualisation, generated, and labelled as such wherever it appears.

The statement

Every image published on this site, with a single exception stated below, is an AI-generated illustrative visualisation produced by Makairo Studios, Nyamira.

None of them depicts the enterprise's actual members, sites, equipment or operations. They are not photographs. The people in them are not our members. The ground in them is not our ground. The equipment in them is not our equipment. They exist to illustrate a kind of work and a kind of terrain, because we do not have photographs of our own and would rather publish a labelled illustration than an unlabelled implication.

The one real photograph

The portrait of Rachel Kwamboka Nyakwara, proprietor, on the about page, is a genuine photograph of a real person. It carries no illustrative label, because applying one would misdescribe it.

It has not been AI-upscaled, enhanced or retouched. The file is low resolution, so it is rendered small and sharp rather than enlarged and soft. If that makes it a modest image on the page, that is the correct outcome: a real photograph rendered honestly is worth more here than a generated one rendered impressively.

How the disclosure is enforced

The labelling is structural rather than editorial, because editorial discipline is exactly what fails on the fourth page of a busy week.

Generated images render only through a component that has no caption prop. The caption is a constant inside it. There is no way to render the image without it, and no way to substitute a different caption from a call site.
That component also has no alt prop. Alt text is assembled from a central registry and always placed behind the disclosure prefix, so the label reaches screen readers, scrapers and AI summarisers rather than only sighted readers.
It has no image prop either. It accepts a code that indexes the registry, so an unregistered image cannot be introduced at a call site.
Captions are permanently visible. They are never behind a hover, never in a tooltip, and never collapsed on small screens.
Real photographs use a separate component that carries no illustrative label. The two cannot be confused where they are used, which is the point of their being separate.

The exact wording used

The caption rendered beneath every generated image on this site reads:

ILLUSTRATIVE VISUALISATION — AI-generated by Makairo Studios. Not a photograph of our members or sites.

And the alt text of every generated image begins with:

Illustrative visualisation:

Both strings above are read directly from the same source the components use. If the wording on this page changes, the wording on every image has changed with it.

The social card

The image used for link previews is a generated plate of terrain. It carries no people, and the disclosure is burned into the image itself along its lower edge, because a social card is the one place an image travels stripped of its caption. Its alt text carries the prefix in the usual way.

Every generated image on this site

All twelve, with the description that follows the disclosure prefix in each one's alt text.

The twelve generated illustrative visualisations used on this site.
Plate	Alt text
w01	Illustrative visualisation: a rain-soaked red earth haul road cut into a green hillside in the western Kenya highlands, wheel ruts filled with standing water, forested ridge behind under low cloud
w02	Illustrative visualisation: two separated heaps of material on a woven polypropylene sheet, coarse dark lumps on the left and screened fine granules on the right, a gloved hand drawing through the fines
w03	Illustrative visualisation: a close view of screened granular mineral material, dark grey and rust-brown particles of roughly even size filling the frame
w04	Illustrative visualisation: a woman in an apron and work gloves shaking a round wooden hand sieve, fine dust falling through the mesh, green hillside visible beyond the shelter
w05	Illustrative visualisation: an open-air sorting yard on red earth with raised wooden screening tables, filled sacks stacked along the edge and a dial scale on a crate, cultivated hills behind
w06	Illustrative visualisation: a filled sack of dark recovered material being steadied on a blue platform scale set on wet red ground, the dial face weathered and its markings not legible
w07	Illustrative visualisation: terraced smallholdings on steep green hillsides in the Kisii–Nyamira highlands, cloud lying in the valley below the ridge line
w08	Illustrative visualisation: a handwritten paper ledger open on a weathered timber bench beside a small tied sample bag of material with a written label
w09	Illustrative visualisation: a single filled and tied sack standing on wet red ground with a blank paper tag attached at the neck, hills out of focus behind
w10	Illustrative visualisation: a sheeted flatbed lorry climbing a wet red earth road between banana and eucalyptus, cultivated hillsides rising on both sides
w11	Illustrative visualisation: work gloves, mud-caked rubber boots, a used dust mask and a round wooden sieve laid out on a timber plank against bare red soil
w12	Illustrative visualisation: a training session in a plain rendered classroom, people seated around a table with printed forms and notebooks while a facilitator stands at a flip chart

Why we do it this way

Generated imagery of people doing work, published by an enterprise that employs people doing that work, is an implied photograph. Readers assume documentation unless told otherwise, and an assessor who later discovers that an unlabelled image was generated is entitled to discount everything else on the page.

The cost of labelling is that the pictures look less like proof. That is the accurate outcome, because they are not proof. What we are asking to be judged on is the record, and the record is not made of pictures.

Contact

Questions about an image

If any image on this site is unclear about what it is, tell us and we will correct the labelling.