Photographer Disqualified from AI Image Contest After Winning with Real Photo | Hacker News Reader

Photographer Disqualified from AI Image Contest After Winning with Real Photo

petapixel.com

82 pointshendi_29 comments

> “I wanted to show that nature can still beat the machine and that there is still merit in real work from real creatives,” Astray tells PetaPixel over email.

Sometimes I don't really "get" the art, but everything about this is [chef's kiss].

Photography isn't real work from real creatives; painting is. All you're doing is pointing a box and pressing a button, the camera does all the work for you :)

I say this in slight jest as someone who does amateur / semi-pro photography. Yes, the barrier to entry to generative AI is lower than the barrier to entry for photography. Just like the barrier to entry for photography is (skill wise) lower than the barrier to entry for painting. That is completely unrelated to the high end / skill ceiling. You can use generative AI in creative ways. Just like you can use a box that instantly captures a scene with the press of a button in creative ways.

Seems more like a professional basketball player dunking on a jr high after school leave to me.

Certainly - a jr high schooler who was talking smack.

No just exists. Not talking smack at all

He got third place though - not first. His comments seem relatively self congratulatory given that context.

Winning this competition must have felt so sweet. I bet some fist pumps and high fives were exchanged.

That actually makes sense - and partially an admission that AI can't compete with real artists yet. It's like a pro sending a picture to an event that only allows amateurs.

He placed third, though, right?

It seems to me that this artist is just proving even more that we're art the stage where AI-generated art generally can't be distinguished from real-world art. This artist submitted a very thought-provoking work (still having a hard time thinking of that picture as a bird myself), and that's what won them the contest. It could just as easily have been generated.

We went from "the judges couldn't tell it was AI generated" to "the judges couldn't tell it was real". What a world we live in

Let me be the one to ask the obvious question, where did the Flamingo's head go?

the head is tucked under the wing. its napping. many birds do this.

You can see part of its black beak on the right hand side.

Why did the AI cross the road?

Well played

Feels like humans cheering for Kasparov when he beat Deep Blue. That fleeting moment in time, a crest of a wave, before the change of times.

What changed exactly? Humans are still competing in chess, earning livelihoods, building fan bases. The ELO world rankings don't have any machines because the International Chess Federation only allows humans to enter competitions, just like all the other IOC sanctioned sports governing bodies. I'm sure Boston Dynamics has long been able to make a robot that can run faster than Usain Bolt, but nobody cared and it didn't matter because robots aren't allowed to compete in officially sanctioned track events. Similar to why MLB teams can't use pitching machines instead of pitchers. A Phalanx can't enter a shooting competition. Wrestling federations don't actually allow man versus car like in Rick and Morty's interdimensional cable.

In some endeavors, humans doing it is the entire point.

Photography captures a real moment, place, or thing.

Generative AI may replace the pictures that hang on the walls of hotel rooms, but I don't see it coming for the photographs in peoples homes, or even art galleries. At least, not at any real scale.

  Do not go gentle into that good night,
  Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Can AI come up with new novel things? A nature photographer could , through luck and hard work, photograph a new species of animal while traveling through an unexplored area. Could AI do that?

Depends on what you mean by novel. When a photographer takes a photo of a new species, are they really creating a new thing? Or just capturing the novelty that nature created? And the form of the species itself is subject to physical and evolutionary constraints, so how novel is it really?

> Could AI do that?

... yes? Have you actually played around with photo generation tools? You can absolutely generate novel images.

At the risk of stating the obvious and wasting people's time, it seems pretty self-evident that knowing about the existence of a species we didn't know about before is more interesting than someone creating an image of something that may or may not exist.

I think you're asserting your opinion about a strawman situation as fact...

Put another, slightly more concrete way: what is more interesting, a photograph of a newly discovered moon of Jupiter, or a new album by Taylor Swift? Obviously people are interested in different things. Believe it or not, many people would forget about the new moon or new species within seconds or minutes.

If someone used generative AI tools to create a visually impactful image, I could imagine someone hanging it on their wall, and being completely disinterested in a photo of a newly discovered jellyfish.

People simply have different interests.

Yes, AI can decide to go on a nature expedition on its own? The delusion has really gone out of hand.

What? That's not what they asked?

> Can AI come up with new novel things?

... still yes. You can use generative AI to general novel text, images, videos, and sounds just as much as you can record or photograph something that has never been captured before with a camera or microphone.

Why did you have such a negative emotional response to such a plain fact?

Edit: wait I said "they" because I thought you clearly misread the comment, but I just realized you posted it yourself. Now I'm really confused.

Disrespectful to the AI art medium.

I don't want to see art from someone who has spent a hundred thousand hours looking at the real world.

I want to see art from someone who has spent a hundred thousand hours looking at AI medium output

For you see, the second artist will be quite mad. The first artist is just a pretentious fake who has not destroyed their own mind.

"Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore." -Dorothy

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