Generative AI scandal has come to one of Nikon's competitions | Hacker News Reader

Generative AI scandal has come to one of Nikon's competitions

dpreview.com

38 pointsDASD58 comments

Here is the video they disqualified: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJSotKghcZ8

I'm a bit surprised the judges themselves didn't spot that it was AI. It immediately starts with things randomly appearing out of nothing.

AI-generated fake footage in medical science is one of the things that worries me a lot these days. Now there's practically a constant stream of papers getting retracted due to fake AI-generated microscopy, before/after photos, plots(!), ...

My thinking is the judges weren't familiar with what a footage like this would actually look like and they might be open to accepting minor video edits for making it interesting.

It's always a slippery slope to judge things as AI first and ask questions laters. I myself feel like I might have started to attribute human effort to AI, and that honestly is the truly sad part.

> The video in question supposedly showed “abnormal beating of airway cilia in a child with primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD), a rare genetic disorder affecting respiratory function,” and the original press release announcing it as the winner had several paragraphs describing the importance of the imagery and how it was captured.

> the winner “acknowledged using AI,” and reports that other scientists raised the alarm about the video, with one expert in PCD saying that the cells in the video “look nothing like those from PCD patients.”

Imagine the gaslighting to the scientists with that press release. This is embarassing that they didn't do their due dilligence and just published it as if its real.

AI kind of won this one imo, or exposed what little fs the company gives about these competitions until it embarasses them. I wonder what their judging standards were pre AI

Wait - I'm confused - how does generative AI slop win competitions if it's slop?

Your question seems like a non-sequitur. The article is about a fraudulent entry, but you're talking about a low quality (or perhaps low-effort) entry.

Real things can be low-quality, and counterfeits can be high-quality, they are separate measures.

There is an unending stream of hate directed towards generative AI calling it "slop" with the insinuation that it must be low quality.

And yet here we have an example that is high quality. How can that be so?

You keep claiming its high quality, but the experts involved disagree, so all that means is that you are easily impressed by slop.

It won the competition. It was evaluated by professional judges. And it won.

Fraud commits fraud using fraud tool because they don't have the skills to win competition and are too lazy to develop them.

Sounds like a sloppy way to win to me.

Ahhh... so you admit it won.

Thank you.

It in fact didn't win, you are commenting underneath an article laying out that it didn't win.

In order for it to be stripped of its first-place prize, it must have first won the first-place prize.

Do you really not understand or are you trolling me?

Well I just judged that I won this argument, so I've won and nothing can take that away.

Ahhh... so you admit you're trolling me.

Are you trolling me?

In order for it to be stripped of its first-place prize, it must have first won the first-place prize.

Looking at the results page, it looks like it was disqualified. If you win something but then are disqualified, then by definition you did not win.

Here’s an easy to understand analogy; if you deposit a fake check for a million dollars, your account will briefly show a million dollars, but then the check bounces, and your balance goes back to what it was before because you were in fact never a millionaire.

Do you really not understand? Or are you trolling me? Really?

Bernard Lawrence Madoff is a great example of this. His company and him are slop. People believed it was not slop and bought into it. It is easier to scam and fool people than one can imagine.

AI slop because it cannot ever appreciate or under stand thing that has been created. It can only interpenetrate based of someone else's writings that has opinions on the subject. It is soulless vessel to create content for profit versus real art which is an extension of emotion.

Even pigs find slop useful and yet would find it less filling when they have a broader understanding of the world around them.

No matter how much you insult it and sling slurs - it won the competition.

I do not respect anyone that commits fraud with AI. They are just like Bernard Lawrence Madoff, trash! No different then the 1990s baseball players that used steroids to break records.

Be that as it may - it was not slop. It won.

I do not respect anyone that commits fraud with AI. They are just like Bernard Lawrence Madoff, trash! No different then the 1990s baseball players that used steroids to break records. Pure trash!

Be that as it may - it still won.

It won.

You've chosen a really bizarre hill to die on here.

"In the beauty contest, the faked picture of a composite girl won! Therefore she is the most beautifulest even though she never existed in the first place! Checkmate, people who don't like my waifu!" /s

Slop doesn't win. Slop loses. This won.

I don’t think the issue in the contest is the quality level of the AI entry; the issue is that it was fraudulent.

I'm referring to the fact it won - which would imply something about the quality level of the AI entry.

You can have a high quality fraud.

Quality and veracity are independent (orthogonal) axes, but we are used to them being correlated, so some people conflate the two.

A knock-off Chanel handbag likely won’t be as good quality as the original, but it could be even better! Even so, it wouldn’t be authentic.

I am discussing quality.

The contest was for a high quality entry that is real. The AI entry wasn't real, so its quality is utterly immaterial and irrelevant to the discussion.

You can make an ultra high quality fake check and deposit it and yet it will still bounce because it turns out the quality is irrelevant if it isn't real.

It also didn't win. By definition a disqualified entry is not a winning entry. That is what the entire article is about, if you read it! The winning entry is here: https://www.nikonsmallworld.com/galleries/2026-small-world-i...

> so its quality is utterly immaterial and irrelevant to the discussion.

My friend, it is the heart of the point I was raising. On my thread. So explain to me how the topic I raised about the quality is irrelevant to what I am saying?

> It also didn't win.

It won first place:

> The company has stripped an entry to its Small World In Motion competition of its first place prize.

In order to be stripped of a prize one must have first won the prize.

Are you an idiot or a troll? I can't tell.

Gen-AI images masquerading as photography are slop regardless of whether they are aesthetically pleasing or technically correct. As soon as you know the situation depicted never happened, no one witnessed it, what you’re seeing is a meaningless, derivative mishmash of other photographs. It’s reduced to pretty lights on a screen. If that wasn’t true, why wouldn’t gen-AI “photographers” proudly disclose that their image was produced with AI?

And they can win competitions because photo competitions are usually already within the realm of derivative.

I'm not saying it shouldn't have been disqualified. I did not say that.

I said that it won.

Nikon is a camera company, seems perfectly reasonable to demand the videos submitted to their competition were captured by cameras and not AI generated.

Yes yes, of course. That's not my question. My question is - if the output of generative AI is slop - how is it that it keeps winning competitions?

Who said it was slop? All I see is it was disqualified for breaking the rules.

Why do you feel compelled to proactively defend generative AI's honor when nobody was even impugning it in this case? Kinda strange behavior IMO.

The unending stream of anti-AI comments that call all output of generative systems slop.

If you really need references I can provide them.

Sure, go for it.

Ok.

To actually answer your question its perfectly clear in a lot of cases that it is slop and theres some simply reasons why slop can win. 1. Generating ai slop is clearly less intensive than producing a real photograph, painting, drawing, etc.

2. Judges for competitions see a lot of stuff - tend to do it quickly - and theres a lot of randomness to who wins. I also just think that judges are often fairly terrible - maybe the incentives just dont exist for getting good judges, especially for competitions (unlike the Nikon one of course) which are smaller e.g. design a poster for our country fair.

So its easy to see that 1. means that the ratio of slop to real can be very high and by 2. the judging process is typically partly random and pretty fallible, so its easy to see how slop can win.

On the judge point, slop appeals to the average and the average is very approachable - so its often the case that people actually prefer ai art to work that is produced from out of an individuals unique experience and vision, which takes more effort to engage with.

Maybe. More likely, it's not all slop.

Its pretty clear that in many cases it doesnt need to be better than slop

So I think by and large it is

And yet this slop won the competition. So perhaps it's not all slop?

Like ive explained winning a competition and being slop are totally sympatico

Edit: I do think its an inditement of the competition when it happens though -- a better organised competition is going to deliver less slop (ai or human)

Have you noticed the similarities between "slop" and other slurs?

Not all AI output is slop.

It is prejudice to insist otherwise.

In photography I think it’s automatically slop if it isn’t coming from an actual documentation of reality.

I don’t apply the same criteria to things that are intended as non-realistic art, you can have non-slop AI graphics, as it doesn’t matter there. But in photography there’s an expectation that the subject is a real moment in time at a real place.

I am referring to the phrase "generative AI slop".

CTRL-F "slop" 0 results

What in the hell are you talking about?

Do I really need to paste all those links again? Really?

What do those links have anything to do with this story?

I'm referring to the trend where all AI output is called slop. And yet here we have an example of it winning a competition.

Look, I put tokens through transformers all day long and am amazed at what they can do, probably just like you. But imagine a Tour de France cyclist wins but is found to be using a hidden ebike motor. But they won and fooled everyone! So what?

The winning submission was SCIENTIFIC FRAUD claiming to be from a medical instrument. The competition was not to produce something that was aesthetically pleasing or that would pass as real images recorded from a camera. Just like the point of the Tour de France is not to be the very fastest in any 2 wheeled vehicle.

But you're right, this isn't slop, it's worse. It's an entitlement that comes with the worst parts of tech hype grifter scenes like NFTs and crypto altcoins. If you can get away with lying and cheating, then it is not just morally okay but a moral obligation.

I hate to ruin your day - but NFTs and crypto alt coins were a scam.

AI is not.

I don't understand how an AI can be scandalized. It's just a spicy auto complete. Sounds more like it's the photographers who are scandalized.

I don't understand how that's possible. Photographers are just spicy primates.

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