Artist refuses prize after his AI image wins at top photo contest
petapixel.com
petapixel.com
What's left is an artist who sets up the contest organizers by
• happily accepting the selection of his work on his website a month before the event (without a mention of intending to refuse the prize),
• then literally the night the before the event, publishing an "open letter" about refusing the prize on the website,
• and finally, showing up uninvited on stage to make his speech about refusing the prize.
This is a clever way of increasing his name awareness by riding the AI art controversy wave, for sure.
He didn't edit an image so much as generate it. His work is closer to a digital painting (from a Wacom tablet, say), than a color-corrected, cropped, then filtered photograph. Everyone else started their process with capturing light from a camera.
> I call my images “images”. They are synthetically produced, using “the photographic” as a visual language. They are not “photographs”.
> Participating in open calls, I want to speed up the process of the Award organisers to become aware of this difference and create separate competitions for AI-generated images.
https://www.eldagsen.com/sony-world-photography-awards-2023/
(1) He says specifically that he intended it as a stunt
(2) He didn't edit any image with AI, he generated it from nothing with text.
As it was intended to be a photo competition, he felt that AI images don't deserve to win "photography" competitions.
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Often the only way to secure anything is to try and break it. This is what we do with penetration testing in technology systems.
The problem is that the organizers aren't being proactive, so sometimes the only next step is some grey-hat stepping in to wave a big flag and saying, "hey, you might want to fix this"
The point of a stunt like this is to prove that a non-photo can win a photography contest, and to highlight how absurd that is.
Would it have been better if someone had earnestly submitted an AI “photo” and accepted the prize quietly instead?
Reducing this to just a “douche move” seems to miss the forest for the trees. The contest will cease to exist or at minimum cease to have any value/meaning if AI submissions become the norm. An alternate framing is that such a form of protest is a necessary inoculation to prevent infinite “douche moves” going forward.
Look at how much praise athletes got by proving they could win contests using doping. They got none because it’s a douche move, even if it’s technically not illegal it’s still cheating, even if they never pick up the prize it’s still ruining the contest. Everyone can imagine you can win a race on doping, nobody learned anything.
Anyway. People who use AI editing tools are at least starting with a photograph, or a collection of photographs, presumably. It is now impossible to tell, by simple visual inspection, if something is a photograph or was created from image generation tools. That's historic.
Maybe "photography" contests should be more strict, with only specific processing filters allowed.
Photos used for editorial purposes in newspapers and magazines at least historically had pretty strict rules about manipulation generally--including the removal of distracting elements that had nothing really to do with the core "truth" of the photo. I suppose the thinking was that manipulation can quickly become a slippery slope.
You're basically putting photos in front of people who've seen it all. They're not impressed by technical perfection or what gets 90+ on 500px.
edit: It's more likely your friend was losing out to people who could take more photos and be more experimental due to not being limited by the the cost of film or delay of development. Film can't touch digital's feedback loop.
The author traveled to the ceremony at his own expense, found that he was not allocated time to speak, then went onstage unannounced to explain his refusal, at which point all physical evidence of his work was removed from the facility, again without comment.
I agree that Sony could have saved itself trouble by requiring the raw camera footage with verifiable exif data.
Feels dystopian that they would just, scrub the winning work from the website and physical location without comment, pretending as if it didn't happen.
the fact that he was able to enter at all with a non-photo is proof that Sony is in the wrong, and despite their coverup, is not, in fact, prepared to deal with "black-hat artists" in this space
when an inadequacy makes itself apparent, the decent thing to do is acknowledge it, thank anyone who helped you see it, and try to make it right – Sony did none of these things, and thus are the "indecent" ones here
Sony problem was in not catching someone who wanted to embarrass them. There's not a good way to detect that in advance.
Sony makes cameras; signing the image in the exif with a public key would establish authenticity.
This event isn't likely to spur that change, but it may well come.
In any case, perhaps some kind of hardware-signed cryptography scheme on the files from the camera could be used in lieu of this development in the future.
RAW files generated "backwards" do already exist. For this, police and forensics have been using special cameras with hardware signatures for raw files for around 15 years, but Canon's and Nikon's system was broken by Elcomsoft like 12 years ago. Sony is trying something similar in their A7 IV, but I don't know how serious it is, and I think it's not as oriented to forensics as Canon and Nikon was.
https://www.elcomsoft.com/news/428.html
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/elcomsoft-claims-to...
https://m.dpreview.com/news/5658217744/sony-a7-iv-gets-anti-...
"Editable" artificial images?
I'll admit those are stretches. Anyway, in addition to a digital signing scheme, these competitions are gonna need more editing restrictions if they want to exclude the use of diffusion models.
- Changing the style of the whole photo to (for instance) make it look old and analog.
- "Enhancing" it with HDR, depth of field, focus everywhere or something like that.
- Altering exposure beyond what you could get out of a underexposed/overexposed RAW file.
- Stylizing the human subjects to make them look more attractive, more grimey or whatever
All these things could arguably be done in photoshop, but its just very labor intensive and more hit-or-miss. Hence the contest rules would have to exclude most photoshop work if they want to exclude diffusion.
There is a big distance between filters which tweak an existing image and generating an image from nothing.
And its literally a continuum from "leave the image 99.9% unchanged" to "change 99.9% of the image"
Trouble is, his work wasn't img2img, there was no initial image as input
Even in traditional film photography, you can easily get "untrue" pictures. Film is sensitive to UV and near infrared, so filters can create very unreal imagery. And multiple exposure can do all sorts of tricks. The averaging of many faces together, creating a sort of uncanny valley result, was first done in the analog, stacking aligned photos with multiple exposure.
This is generally still considered photography. Art photography, if it's any good.
One could say the key element is the artist combining actual scenes that were exposed to film or a sensor. Perhaps massaged a bit in the dark room or digitally. But the core material is exposed images from actual scenes. It's photography while that element remains dominant. But then again ... isn't that sort of what these generative AIs also do? It's all originally derived from actual photographs.
So, on AI generators. I am an artist, I have painted and photographed all my life. The average prompter has no chance to win against a professional. I know which artist is presented in the data set, how to use the light and composition. So basically speaking, this is the new Photoshop. The interesting question is what will hold long term more value in the future? The generated content or analogue product.
I think you're trying very hard to poke holes at a very run-of-the-mill process. It's easy to pick apart stuff post-facto when you have the benefit of context and hindsight, and you are certain of what you're looking at.
If instead you're judging artwork, it would be unthinkable to reason "this work is pretty good but the model's fingers might look a bit off, and that is a good enough reason to reject the prize".
Throwing blanket accusations of incompetence at the jury also says more about yourself than the contest.
The truth of the matter is that AI -generated images are becoming quite impressive and can be a challenge to tell apart. This is not a problem with a jury in a context. We had deep fakes in the recent past, and they are improving rapidly.
It's easy to try to elevate yourself by putting down others, but while you're there making claims like it's obvious that the streaming audio of Biden and Obama and Trump and Hillary hanging out playing Minecraft is bullshit, multiple high-ranking officials already fell for calls from people using similar tech to impersonate world leaders.
It really isn't. It's fine you tried to play Catch the Differences after knowing what to look at. That's not what people do with photos running in contests.
Composition push-ups, color-theory pull-ups, subject lighting crunches. It’s not easy but you gotta get artistically ripped before you can be a judge art.
Calling out your need to put down others with petty, frivolous details to feel better about youself and your insecurities/frustrations is not an issue of offense. You're contributing to shut down an otherwise interesting discussion just because you feel the need to elevate yourself at the expense of others.
> But this is obvious for a trained eye, which a professional must have.
The fact is that you're clearly wrong, as demonstrated by this contest and the fact that the AI generated image was awarded the top prize by its jury.
Your only counterclaim is that you portray yourself as better than others without reason or substance, and in the process tried to make it about you and elevate yourself at the expense of others by spreading baseless accusations of incompetence.
Again, this says more about you than AI generated content and those who evaluate it, and this discussion is really not about you.
That a professional jury awarded the prize to an AI-generated image is proof that AI has reached a good enough level to fool a trained eye.
To come later, with prior knowledge that it was AI-generated, point out “tells” and generally armchair-quarterback the process, proves absolutely nothing about the jury’s competence.
Clearly you haven't spent much time in the art world. The idea of competence is fundamentally opposed with the reigning ideology in fine art (as opposed to commercial art).
The pupils aren’t quite right on the front woman’s eyes. Her right eye has a sort of lump and her left iris isn’t quite round.
The fabric over chest looks more like carved stone.
100% I’d not have said ‘AI’ on first look though, and if someone did a reverse-switcheroo and said ‘actually it’s real’ I could be convinced.
But ultimately photography becomes a sport - yes it's possible to run faster / lift more if you take the drugs. But we ban that because of reasons, much like I suspect competitions will ban AI content and possibly so will newspapers.
(which is why the above signing of images might be a huge step forward)
Better just to stick with the social, and tell people that violating the rules will result in disqualification and a ban.
I mean, a camera manufacturer could issue a digitally signed certificate that this key should be only embedded in a particular camera, but it doesn't prove that a copy wasn't made beforehand or extracted from that camera, or that someone wasn't able to misuse the manufacturer's signing keys to sign a few extra keys to be sold to e.g. propaganda manufacturers.
But given that any idiot can fake a picture of Obama \ Trump / shaking hands with <insert here> it would be nice to have something that easily and automatically gets repudiated 99% of the time - we want to default trust not default distrust. Life is much much harder the other way round and design society to promote what makes society stronger is a good thing.
I have a publicity stunt feel but I have to agree at the same time. What is even the point, this leads to photographers being pressured using AI and Photoshop to be "creative" if this is allowed, they should not talk about photographs if that case and make different categories.
Issue is, you can not verify if some slight filters and stuff is used on photos. Not know much about the topic but I guess they all use some kind of filters. But that is still very different than just telling an AI to generate picture for you, even if you feed it your own originals.
For some reason image AI have a terrible time with hands. Some platforms produce the wrong number of fingers for instance, sometimes wildly wrong - 12, 15, 20 fingers.
It is now like you had contests for nail smiths, and suddenly you could buy the nicest nails at home depot.
Edit: Also you wouldn't hand out prices for a reprint of an oil painting.
With blackjack. And hookers.
Sure, they should be treated as separate categories of art, just as we don't include photographs in painting contests, however, that was solved by the artist promptly refusing the prize and disclosing the origin; but until this automatically dismissive attitude persists, triggering this discussion is a good thing - and I'd rather condemn the actions of the organizers, attempting to silently erase this event and pretending it didn't happen. Their jury did decide that at least in some cases an AI generated image can be better art than a "manually" taken photo, and they need to own that decision.
Should we "condemn" the judges of chess tournaments for not allowing live coaching and chess AIs?
If the chess community would assert that computers are worse than humans as chess and couldn't ever match human play, and when someone won a chess tournament with forbidden computer assistance the judges of that tournament would instead of saying "yep, the win was due to a forbidden advantage, so we disqualified that participant" rather hide the fact and go "no, that didn't happen, obviously human reasoning won all the games", then we should absolutely condemn them for that hypocrisy.
His work is quite strong.
https://www.eldagsen.com/pseudomnesia/
"Just as photography replaced painting in the reproduction of reality, AI will replace photography. Don’t be afraid of the future. It will just be more obvious that our mind always created the world that makes it suffer."
The subject matter is probably what "won" the contest, it's pretty well composed.
https://www.eldagsen.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/preview_...
.. I was impressed with composition(s) as well.
Rather what people were using photography for in the past may be replaced by AI. Before people went to stock photo sites for cheap images to put on their website or whatever, and tomorrow they'll find out it can be cheaper on midjourney or stable diffusion and it will do that.
But AI won't replace photography for what photography does, rather it will replace photography as the cheapest satisfactory image to use on your website that doesn't need a depiction of reality.
That's one use of photography. OP is about an art contest, not a photojournalism contest.
But as far as "reproduction of reality", obviously AI productions unreality won't replace photography. It might replace reproduction of reality, though.
No, OP is about a photo contest, not an art contest.
>World Photography Organization’s Sony World Photography Awards
AI is even less than that - people who want a computer to make their artistic decisions for them have a neural net author an image or other work for them. generally the humans having no more artistic input than someone who commissions a piece from an artist by explaining what they want.
A person painting makes a trillion times more artistic decision making than someone 'painting' with a neural net. They aren't the author of the work, and can't enter it into art competitions on their own behalf (unless the rules are stupid), and can't register it for copyright as there is no human authorship.
It is the complete dissolution of human art making - its humans deciding to have a non human thing - that cannot feel emotions or understand the emotions in an image - make 'art' for them. Most because they are incapable of doing it themselves so having something is better than having nothing, some because they do art primarily for money and the neural net works faster than them and they haven't figured out the bit about no copyright yet, or will misrepresent it to illegally get a copyright on an image they didn't author.
That last point about feelings and emotions however is not clear cut, imo. Typically the process is itertive, so it's a loop and there is a feeling agent in that loop. Also if you yourself make art, you must have noticed how sometimes even the simplest of tools (say a brush or nib) create ~accidental features of the work that one finds entirely pleasing. This happens a lot to me with ink and brush :) The general input is distincly my line, it is my hand w/o a question, but I have a few works which feature engaging aspects that were partly accidental, and part of the delight is precisely that: me, the supposed author, is surprised.
Is someone who continually commissions art until they arrive at a painting they like making artistic decisions in the work? I don't think so.
>you must have noticed how sometimes even the simplest of tools (say a brush or nib) create ~accidental features of the work that one finds entirely pleasing. This happens a lot to me with ink and brush :) The general input is distincly my line, it is my hand w/o a question, but I have a few works which feature engaging aspects that were partly accidental, and part of the delight is precisely that: me, the supposed author, is surprised.
That is unquestionably something you authored, even the mistakes, even the mistakes you liked. But at no point of commissioning artwork are you making artistic decisions.
It's an accurate description of whats going on. Commissioning paintings until you get the one you want isn't artistic expression, or artistic decision making, and the human coming up with prompts will be replaced by a machine learning program trained on prompts, as they bring the least value to the process and are the most easily replaced.
> And from a purely practical point of view, getting worked up over this is tilting at windmills.
I'm not worked up at all. I'm explaining whats going on. Is anyone who thinks differently from you getting worked up? Are you getting worked up for imagining emotions I'm not experiencing? In the future just argue ideas instead of imagining emotions across internet mind reading.
>Change is the constant. And there will be undoubtedly 'artist commissioners' that will outshine others, using the same 'artist'.
It will all approach zero value, so it doesn't matter. It's inauthentic, uncopyrightable stuff based on the misappropriation of the work of actual artists. The expert 'commissioners' will also be replaced by machine learning faster than anyone else.
Leonardo used the camera obscura as part of the creation of some of his paintings. Rockwell worked from photographs to produce most of his illustrations. Many serious artists in the future will certainly spend time crafting prompts.
Where and how the line would be drawn and you'd enforce it would be interesting discussions though.
There may be ways to check the first output of an AI algorithm but there are a lot of filters and simple techniques that can disguise the source of an image.
That sentence infuriates me way more than it should. Are you sure it's Latin? Are you sure it's not Swahili? Also, don't define a term with itself.
Reminds me of those stories of people on horseback trying to race locomotives.
That is a pretty amazing quote.
It’s more like the training data is used to score the generated images against to guide it into producing something that looks similar to a real image
How can anyone objectively judge art when we cannot even give it basic definition? What is art? What is beauty? Does it have to beautiful? Etc.
I find contest in art (including music) demotivating. It basically waste time for anyone who not win and it subjectivly says what is good and what is not good enough. I find it even toxic for creativity iself. If you create for promoting yourself or to win contest, is it still art?
This, seems outside the lines. Entering a photography contest with work that isn't based in photography, that you didn't shoot, isn't in the spirit of the contest. A photograph is an image created by light falling on a photosensitive surface - Edit all you want, hell edit till it's not even the same thing anymore, but if you're entering a photography content, at least trigger a shutter. The Sony photography awards are very clearly based around photography as the fundamental starting point. There are lots of pure digital art contests to enter, so enter them.
That doesn't mean technology won't outrun our ability to detect it, just that this images will probably seem like an obvious AI image in a few years.
For now, we need to manually count knuckles.
Did he submit his work in the contest and then refuse the prize ala Sokal [1] because it was generated using AI?
What he didn't want was the prize for a photo contest.
Exploring the world of impossibilities is probably going to be a new kind of science.
So far, most of science has delved into what we think seems possible and tried to find our way towards it, but what about what seems impossible? How much exploration have we done in that direction? Well, AI seems to be the most equipped vehicle to explore this new world.
Theories are about to be proven wrong or right, no in-between. This is going to be interesting.
> IMAGERY IS NOT REAL
> 90 Miles is a post-photography AI reporting illustration experiment exploring historical events and realities of Cuban life that have, since 1961, motivated Cubans to cross the 90 miles of ocean separating Havana from Florida.
> For over 25 years, I kept a list of subjects to document but was unable to, mainly due to access or that access was impossible. While working in Cuba from 2014-2016, more subjects were added to the list with the assumption they would likely never be created...
> ...The Cubans who attempt the crossing are incredibly resourceful, as necessary to the journey and as reflected in rafts often assembled from inner tubes, pieces of wood and plastic, household supplies, etc.
Of all the AI-art controversies so far, this one really rankled me. This guy has had an immensely successful career in documentary photography, he's gained fame and prestige based on the veneer of truth and reality that journalism confers to his line of work. And now he's going to torch the integrity of the profession for some NFT profit?
Ironically, he's done a bunch of work documenting Cuban life. So the photos he generates will probably bear some resemblance to reality he's observed. But why not amplify the work of young/undiscovered photographers who do have the chance to document the plight of refugees? Just shocked at how little he cares about trivializing refugees and future aspiring documentarians.
I think you are missing the point.
There is no "integrity" in photography outside of the photographer one. Images are and always have been fabrication. Choice of subject, framing, setting, careful curation, the photo is a medium of expression which is not that different from writing something.
The message Christopher Brown is conveying is very clear. It’s not that meaningfully different to create the point of view he wants to share using machines or using a camera.
Yes, of course photography is an expression for the reasons you mention. When I see a documentary photograph, I know it's not the "whole picture" but just a moment lasting 1/200s and maybe 1 out of 500 photos that a photographer picked out. But I do assume that the moment I'm seeing did actually exist from that perspective, and that there are real limits to how the photographer can control the image. That claim to reality is all that documentary photography has to elevate it from artistic and illustrative photography.
Here's an example (from the NFT AI Cuban project) of what gets lost when we treat realistic AI-generations on the same epistemic level of a traditional documentary photo
https://twitter.com/SaabGT750/status/1643651637033017345
Knowing that this photo is AI generated, what are we supposed to make from it? Of course the human pictured doesn't exist, but does this helmet actually exist as part of the Cuban refugee life, or is it purely an artifact of the AI's hallucination? Documentary work has been great at showing how fact is stranger than fiction — e.g. how during in war, people can have moments of laughter and goofiness. Treating AI photos and documentary work on equal footing ultimately erodes our understanding of how expansive and weird reality can be.
I code. I am also an oil painter. I suck at composition. If I ask an AI to layout a scene, is my meatspace painting less art? ( i have not done that just got the idea..)
AI is a tool in the toolbox.
Is someone who buys paint in tubes cheating because they did not grind lapis and mix it with rapeseed oil?
And the artists “performance” at the ceremony is top quality art (humour, satire, insight, and a reflection on our society).