Artist Refuses Prize After His AI Image Wins at Top Photo Contest

[Tin Can]

https://petapixel.com/2023/04/14/art...photo-contest/

[Pieter]

https://petapixel.com/2023/04/14/art...photo-contest/

One of the things this seems to indicate to me is how little time the judges have or can spend looking at each entry. So the selection appears rushed and superficial.

[Alan Klein]

My 55+ adult only community photo club has photo contests with other 55+ communities clubs every year. It's going to be interesting to see how we're going to handle AI.

[paulbarden]

It took me five seconds to identify that image as AI-generated: look at the "less-than-human" fingers on the right side. The judges should have spotted this as a fake photo in a heartbeat.

EDIT: the judges knew this was an AI image, and the Sony competition rules say nothing about the images having to be created by an actual camera. So the guy's entry was within bounds - he just wanted to see what would happen.

[Michael R]

My understanding is the judges knew it was AI.

It is often still easy to recognize AI by looking at hands/fingers, which current AI apparently has some trouble with, so creepy, malformed fingers and such are sometimes a dead giveaway - as in this case.

[Drew Wiley]

On the interesting yet spooky 60 Minutes segment on AI last nite, an AI program was tasked with identifying which essays written by a classroom of students were done using AI, and hence were cheating. It was just a trial test of the system, and not a real grading situation. But it flagged the only legitimate essay written without AI as a fake one, and cleared many of the fakes.

[Vaidotas]

My 55+ adult only community photo club has photo contests with other 55+ communities clubs every year. It's going to be interesting to see how we're going to handle AI.

Same age here but I feel extremely old when look at these contests nominations - AI or not AI.
Kind of tectonic shift happened in photographic perception.
Look in to Hasselblad magazine let’s say from 1995 to this day as example.

[Kiwi7475]

On the interesting yet spooky 60 Minutes segment on AI last nite, an AI program was tasked with identifying which essays written by a classroom of students were done using AI, and hence were cheating. It was just a trial test of the system, and not a real grading situation. But it flagged the only legitimate essay written without AI as a fake one, and cleared many of the fakes.

That make sense — if AI could detect and ultimately knew what makes it AI-ish, it should then be able to make it indistinguishable from a human version, no?

[Kiwi7475]

I gotta say there’s something very uncanny and unnerving in that picture — and not related to the “impossible fingers”. AI or not AI, to me it is a “photo” that generates a reaction, and because of that worth of praise (prize or not is a different question since that’s just a political construct). We seem focused on “it’s a photo” or “it’s not a photo” but the reality is that it brought something new and of value to the world, at least to me.

[drew.saunders]

Here's an interview with an artist who uses AI to initiate her images and calls her work "synthography." https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023...llel-universe/
Of special note is that she doesn't just type in some phrases and calls it quits. She starts with the image generated by AI and then modifies it to get the image she wants. No, it's not photography, and she's honest about that, but it's still creating something unique and, at least partially, human-made.