Award Winning Photo Revealed as Being AI Creation

what surprises me is that people are trying to create porn like content on blue willow...... i mean seriously

With respect, I'd think that'd be the least surprising thing about all of it... :p

Exactly. I looked at it for 3 seconds and saw the issues immediately.

What do you use?

[Sorry, couldn't resist ;) ]

Interesting - I think that the perspective that matters most is that of the audience - after all it's the reason that art is created in the first place. and this is where the problems begin - when the audience is unable to distinguish between art that required human input (both in the conceptualisation and in the implementation) and artificially produced art, the value of human art is legitimately called into question.

Then there's the blurry bit in the middle where you can stand there with your camera and tell it to take a photo whenever it detects a smiling face (I don't know, is there a camera that does this already? I've no doubt it can be done now). Same applies to music (which is, arguably, further along this frightening path).

I foresee a world in which you won't be able to tell easily - especially since it is often the unusual or edgy quality of a piece of art that impresses - it is at the edges of our aesthetic imagination that artificially generated art threatens our ability to identify it. What will this mean for our sense of our selves. Human beings have incorporated ever widening ideas of what it means to be human. So we have gone from hunting and gathering to talking down wires and flying about. But the pace of those advances have allowed us to incorporate them in our idea of what it means to be human. What must have it felt like for the first people to see a photograph? maybe, not so weird given that there were already photo-realistic paintings. In any case, the human hand was visible in each and every advance. That is so palpably not the case anymore. What will it be like to wake up in the middle of the night and see traffic jams of self-driving delivery vehicles moving about at night whilst we humans sleep?

the genie is well out of the bottle, this isn't something that can be shackled anymore. Nor do I think that there can be any appeal to morality such as calling on the producers of AI to self-identify as such. Who cares? certainly not the consumers, I would argue. If it looks good to them, they will buy it and put it on their walls; listen to it on their headphones and yes, get off on it in private. the world is going to be a very different place - the centrality of humans as agents is going to be very challenged. I'm kinda glad I'm getting on in years.

objectively, though, why would it bother you - if it is truly bettered then is that not a good thing? I mean, if someone creates a sublime piece of music and a computer analyses it, identifies whatever it is that made it sublime and improves it then surely it can only please you, the listener, more?

I made a lot of book covers (thrillers and stuff) in the past and I foresee that not many photographers will get assignments like that anymore. It's more likely that the designer of the cover just uses AI to generate the image.

Always loved this work. Here's my wife playing corpse:

In hindsight I see the forum software labeled the image as shot with a D300. Actually, the main image was shot With a Hasselblad around 1990 while the reproduction was indeed made with a D300 and a Nikon 105mm VR f/2.8 macro lens much later.

Seeing the image three hours later, it's almost reduced to only 'black' and 'white' without any intermediate gray areas. What happened?

One is a real capture of a genuine creation of nature, the other isn't. If all that matters is "better" then we should rejoice in watching athletes pumped to the eyeballs with drugs smashing world records, or even genetically engineering our children to all be 'perfect' specimens of the human race. Each to his own, I suppose, but such prospects don't do it for me.

I completely agree with your definition of photography and the importance of focusing on the process used to create an image rather than its appearance or intent. It's important to have clear definitions and standards to ensure that we are accurately labeling and categorizing images.

I also agree that there should be no inherent ethical value assigned to any image-making process. The ethics come into play with how the creator presents their work and whether they are being honest about the process used to create it. Honesty and transparency are crucial in maintaining trust and credibility in the art and photography world.

As AI and other new image-making technologies continue to evolve, it's important to continue having these conversations and adapting our definitions and standards to reflect these changes. Ultimately, the process of creating an image should be the defining factor in determining whether it's a photograph or not.

(This response was generated by ChatGPT)

So I guess that the remedy is for the organizers of photographic contests to submit each entry to another AI and ask it "was this photo generated by an AI"? 😉

The story behind the photo and the story surrounding it have always been as important as the photo itself, and AI won't change that.

In the context of the new technology as discussed in this thread I just remembered one particular scene from a 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie titled "The running man" in which (AI) deepfake was presented allready though it was still science fiction at the time.

In the scene an entire fight is falsified to the point that the footage seems authentic through the means of computer algorithm. After seeing this back again after all these years it is suddenly not that hard anymore to imagine for Skynet to come and hunt us one day. While the latter merely is a fictional movie entity still various autonomous weapons allready exist at this very moment.

Disclaimer
Here's the scene from 'The running man', watch at your own discretion, my point is entirely about the risk and impact of AI but the movie was a very violent action movie to begin with.

Watch the scene on Youtube

A lot of movie sci-fi is becoming ever closer to reality. The progress in robotics is borderline scary, with two-legged creations now running on uneven surfaces, backflipping, et al.

In the best case, once can take it is a horribly manipulated photo, which should have been disqualified in the first place.

I wonder if the whole thing was 'staged' on purpose, meaning the judges knew all along?

How My AI Image Won a Major Photography Competition | Scientific American

Apologies if this has been posted upthread — I’m not following this controversy closely here.

Let's consider the following:

• A photographer stands on a street corner and makes a photo that wins a major international street photography competition.
• A photographer sets up a camera trap at the same street corner and sets the camera to make one frame every 15 minutes. One of the resulting photos wins a major international street photography competition.
• A photographer sets up a video camera at the same street corner. The camera is constantly running and records 4K video at 30 frames per second to an external device. An AI app simultaneously analyzes every frame of video. It's been "taught" to recognize the qualities shared by great street photography. When the app finds an image that meets the criteria, that frame is saved. All other frames are deleted. One of the saved frames wins a major international street photography competition.

Which of the above award-winning photos is art? Which of the above photographers is an artist?

Ha! :)

A simple solution would be to request finalists submit raw files for review.

Better still, people could just be honest. I can be a bit of a bad loser on occasion, but I'd far rather lose than win by deception or outright cheating.

In a perfect world, honesty and integrity would guide the actions of all contest entrants. Unfortunately, that is not the world in which we live.

The issue here are the people calling it Photography, wet plate, tintype, collodion, etc…when it absolutely is not. There is no skill from the person typing in the instructions. This does nothing but dilute real photographic talent.

A real tin type photographer, Shane Balkowitsch is doing an interview with this award winner…and discussing the issue on FB and Instagram.