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Comment by azubinski | Hacker News Reader

"AI images and photography should not compete with eachother in an award like this. They are different entities. AI is not photography. Therefore I will not accept the award"

That is, the author of this dirty trick knew this very well from the very beginning, but nevertheless he submitted to the competition not a real shot (which is a unique stopped flat moment of reality), but a synthetic picture of which he is not the author.

And after all this, the author of this trick gracefully declined the award.

Someday such a logic of such bad fools will destroy this world.

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At a minimum the author has been a professional photographer for over 30 years, and an art professor for over 6 years.

If he believes that the industry needs a reckoning and that this is the best way to accelerate that, I think he deserves the benefit of the doubt.

I disagree.

Too many people happily go along with the status quo, despite correctly recognizing something should be changed. It takes energy, courage, and sacrifice to create change. A body at rest will remain at rest unless acted up on by an outside force.

In this case, this author correctly recognized that its better to force the conversation now, himself, than let things play themselves out naturally.

Excuse me, but what kind of "changes" are you talking about?

Professionalism is primarily built on trust, including a mutual trust in professional systems. Therefore, students are not allowed to cheat on exams, for example (not only for this reason, of course, but also for this reason).

If you think that the destruction of the system of mutual trust is some kind of "change", then I want to upset you, because such "changes" do not require software systems on the scale of modern "AI" at all.

By this act nothing but destroying the mutual trust was done. Now the organizers of professional photography competitions will not trust photographers, and photographers will not trust the organizers of competitions.

> Now the organizers of professional photography competitions will not trust photographers, and photographers will not trust the organizers of competitions.

"organizers of professional photography competitions will not trust photographers"

But this is already present. There were plagiarism or alleged plagiarism scandals [1][2][3]. There were cases of doctored photographs [4][5], or misinformation [6]

Most competitions use means to protect against this to some extent [7]

So what is new?

1: https://petapixel.com/2017/04/01/plagiarism-coincidence-curi...

2: https://blog.photoshelter.com/2021/10/a-student-plagiarized-...

3: https://www.boredpanda.com/man-steals-photo-wins-exhibition-...

4: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/photography...

5: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/05/arts/design/world-press-p...

6: https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/world-press-photo-award-wi...

7: https://time.com/3706626/world-press-photo-processing-manipu...

I appreciate your idealism, but the unfortunate reality is that we cannot simply hope people will do the right thing and it will be so.

    Now the organizers of professional photography competitions will not trust photographers, and photographers will not trust the organizers of competitions.

The entire point of this exercise was to point out exactly that organizers SHOULD NOT trust photographers. That these systems must be built without trust in mind, or the competitions are quickly going to become worthless.

Take a look at the other entries. All sorts of abstract stuff combined with photos. It's not a realistic photography contest.

> a unique stopped flat moment of reality

I wonder what Andy Warhol would make of that definition.

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