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Artist refuses prize after his AI image wins at top photo contest

207 points by kyleyeats 3y ago

tommek4077 3y ago
Maybe contests should ask themselves if they need to change. Handing out prices for creations at the event. 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.
- yborg 3y ago
  It's more like having a contest that issues a prize to the person that hired the best artist to create a work. I guess it's as valid as any other arbitrary competition; we issue prizes to the owner of the fastest horse in a race regardless of who rides it.
- hgsgm 3y ago
  The contest sponsor sells cameras. So... maybe the whole business needs to change, if reality is obsolete.
eimrine 3y ago
Just look at the most left hand, it is so crooked. But at least 2 of 3 hands are correct which is more than lucky based on my experience with stable diffusion. Usually the result is something like this image hosted on twitter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32875215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32875215
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  You can get them looking pretty good with inpainting (just cut out the hands area), a hands LORA, and a couple of generation attempts.
porbelm 3y ago
What he did was awesome, and the complete silence from the organizers is such a laff, I think they are so effing embarrassed lol
- porbelm 3y ago
  Just to clarify; I don't think AI-generated images have anything to do in a traditional photography contest. Prompt-creators can create their own festival. With blackjack. And hookers.
  - PeterisP 3y ago
    I think it has some conceptual value - if many artists are saying that the ML models can't create real art and only get a mediocre rehash of existing ideas (which by definition can't be better than those ideas), then having the same artists judge whether some piece ML art actually is better than anything the traditional artists submitted kind of brings the theoretical argument down to reality. 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.
    - pessimizer 3y ago
      There's nothing wrong with just automatically dismissing AI created art in the context of a contest. We don't allow horses to enter marathons, because even though they're fast it's not for them. We don't even allow people to use performance enhancing drugs, which might be a closer comparison. Should we "condemn" the judges of chess tournaments for not allowing live coaching and chess AIs?
      - PeterisP 3y ago
Invictus0 3y ago
AI images are not photos, obviously. We've conflated these words for a long time because the only way to create an image was by digitizing light. These AI images have more in common with a collage than a photo.
- circuit10 3y ago
  I don’t think a collage is the right way to describe it, because it implies that it’s literally parts of the training data copied together which a lot of people think but it’s a lot more indirect than that, but I agree that it’s not a photo because a photo is of a real thing 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
neom 3y ago
I've told the story a few times on HN about the "cheating" in my 2007 Digital Imaging college photography contest for the Digital Imaging program[1]. In our instance, we're a totally (brand new) digital program, and someone combined some framed and created a scene that didn't exist, they shot the scenes separately and combined them. Our prof told folks to f'off when they complained as it was well within the lines. I agreed. That said... 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. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35020010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35020010
- hgsgm 3y ago
  That's entirely the point of the OP. To promote AI segregation on art contests, and not let AI secretly win every photo contest.
- filoleg 3y ago
  Agreed. For something like a photography contest, I am surprised they didn't have explicitly defined rules around it, like requiring contestants to provide the original RAW image (as a proof of work), having an explicit list of what is allowed to be tweaked (and nothing else would be allowed) like brightness/color grading/etc.
brucethemoose2 3y ago
Where is the line gonna be drawn? How much of a difference is there between low strength img2img and a "smart" Photoshop filter. Maybe "photography" contests should be more strict, with only specific processing filters allowed.
- ghaff 3y ago
  A lot of this predates generative AI. I know someone who used to be really into photography competitions and the like and he basically got discouraged because the photos he really worked on to get perfect right out of the camera were suddenly starting to lose to digital photos that had been enhanced in Photoshop in various ways. 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.
  - Kye 3y ago
    What wins photography competitions breaks assumptions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcxcGBbLIwk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcxcGBbLIwk 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.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Probably true of a lot of things. Food, theatre, art generally... Well-executed versions of something they've seen a million times before just isn't all that interesting.
- Pelayu 3y ago
  I've entered photography contests before, and the ones I entered requested the raw file from the camera as well as your final .jpg/.png as a way of proving it was you at that took the image.
readthenotes1 3y ago
[flagged]
- lostlogin 3y ago
  That sounds like something that would get people fired up.
nbzso 3y ago
It is mind-boggling how the "trends" and the non-stop race for validation make all lose their minds. How on earth a photo contest cannot see the false anatomy of the hands and person behind? Did someone in this concourse is actual photographer? Maybe not. 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.
- eimrine 3y ago
  Can you describe what is wrong with the person behind? I can clearly see the hands issue and even I can see a strange hair on another person near her left ear. But the person behind seems correct to me.
  - smusamashah 3y ago
    Look at the dark eye, an artifact on nose, the lighting on the cheek behind shoulder. Fingers of her hand have abnormal thickness, index finger has very long nail, meaning they are not equal in length.
    - lostlogin 3y ago
      The woman in the foreground seems strangely 2D, like the background woman is holding a cardboard cutout. The background woman is somehow too close. 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.
    - eimrine 3y ago
      Thank you, now I see it all. This artifacts use to rhyme/mimicre with old-photo style and big artifacts on top-left quarter of image so they are not easy to see but now I see a usual stable diffusion style with noticeable disrespect to 3D objects everywhere.
lifeisstillgood 3y ago
There are steps in solutions like this (I would imagine a first being all images are hashed / signed by a key stored on the camera itself, so the orignal raw image can be audited later - this is something that will help more jounralistically than artists but it's relevant) 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)
- visarga 3y ago
  I somehow feel there are technical reasons why this won't work.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- rendall 3y ago
  Auditing data could always be spoofed. There is no technology fix for this. Better just to stick with the social, and tell people that violating the rules will result in disqualification and a ban.
- PeterisP 3y ago
  How do you tell that some key is stored solely on a particular camera? 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.
  - lifeisstillgood 3y ago
    All of that is fair. The secure enclave on an iPhone is only so secure. 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.
wslh 3y ago
Sorry, but I don't understand and I am confused. Did he submit his work in the contest and then refuse the prize ala Sokal [1] because it was generated using AI? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
- DangitBobby 3y ago
  In the article, he explains his goal was to accelerate the conversation around AI in photography that the field isn't ready to have yet, and didn't want his submission to win.
  - hgsgm 3y ago
    Of course he wanted his submission to win. If his submission lost, it wouldn't accelerate the conversation as he hoped. What he didn't want was the prize for a photo contest.
    - DangitBobby 3y ago
      Nitpicking
stavros 3y ago
> PSEUDOMNESIA is the Latin term for pseudo memory 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.
- lostlogin 3y ago
  It reminded me of the pained actors in the series Berlin, where they are making a movie and and all being overly artistic. Slightly fitting too, though that was set in the ‘20s from memory.
- deafpolygon 3y ago
  https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100352171 https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority... https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/pseudomnesia https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/pseudomnesi... https://dictionary.apa.org/pseudomemory https://dictionary.apa.org/pseudomemory https://www.dictionary.net/pseudomnesia https://www.dictionary.net/pseudomnesia
  - stavros 3y ago
    No need to quote dictionaries for my own language to me.
jorgesborges 3y ago
This may not be photography and it’s certainly controversial given the context, but it’s still interesting, meaningful and “good” art produced by an artist… using AI.
pmoriarty 3y ago
Not surprising. Decent AI generated images tend to be better then those created by your typical artist, and AI image generators in the hands of a good artist can create some incredible work that most human artists will struggle to compete with. Reminds me of those stories of people on horseback trying to race locomotives.
flandish 3y ago
AI art is still 100% art. If any of us ever consider coding artistic and inventive, then AI art is also art. 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?
- robocat 3y ago
  Ironically photography was historically seen as “not art” by many traditionalists. That background is possibly why a new form of art using different tools triggers them - photographic competitions (anthropomorphically) are maybe just a tad sensitive on the topic? And the artists “performance” at the ceremony is top quality art (humour, satire, insight, and a reflection on our society).
tulio_ribeiro 3y ago
His submission might have won the competition because of his name, if he didn’t use a pseudonym. His name would make them think that the submission was human-made, not AI-generated.
danso 3y ago
A renowned documentary photographer (e.g. worked for Magnum) I've greatly respected recently announced a NFT project consisting of AI-generated photos on the topic of Cuban refugees [0] > 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. [0] https://www.instagram.com/p/CqniSVjrj0h/?hl=en https://www.instagram.com/p/CqniSVjrj0h/?hl=en
- WastingMyTime89 3y ago
  > And now he's going to torch the integrity of the profession for some NFT profit? 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.
  - danso 3y ago
    > the photo is a medium of expression which is not that different from writing something. 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 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.
dalbasal 3y ago
There's an important point to consider. Our ability to detect "real" dialogue, images and whatnot will develop as we go. What fools us now will not fool us as easily in the near future. 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.
tedivm 3y ago
> 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. That is a pretty amazing quote.
- tayo42 3y ago
  Unless I'm misinterpreting the intent, it doesn't make sense to me. Painting wasn't replaced?
  - singpolyma3 3y ago
    As the main "reproduction of reality" it was. No one would take a painted portrait of their dad out and say "this is my dad" anymore
  - PeterisP 3y ago
    It kind of did - the vast majority of the jobs done by painters were actually replaced; painting in general and painting as fine art continued on but the vast majority of painting which was done for mundane decorative purposes effectively shrunk away, as did most of the "portraiting" industry; in some cases people still order their portraits (e.g. the gallery of presidents) but is far scarcer and employs far less painters, as for this "job" painting was replaced by photography.
imwillofficial 3y ago
“prompt whispering” sounds like something a tech priest would do.
JoeAltmaier 3y ago
Surely the grotesquely malformed hands was a clue. 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.
- brk 3y ago
  Hands are notoriously hard to draw/create realistically. This is why so many animated characters only have 3 fingers instead of 4.
- tracerbulletx 3y ago
  There are plenty of models and workflows now for getting the hands right now and there has been for a few months.
  - JoeAltmaier 3y ago
    Perhaps this submission was prior to that, or using an older model.
- timetraveller26 3y ago
  Hands are really weird if you look at them closely
- dkarras 3y ago
  maybe it is because I spent a lot of time with AI generated imagery but I would figure notice that this is an AI image right away - even ignoring the hands (the days of us being able to do this by eye is numbered though). Surprised that the jurors in a prestigious photography contest did not figure it out or even suspected.
  - PeterisP 3y ago
    I'd assume that there are many people in the art world who have never seriously looked at AI generated imagery - especially the part of community which is more prestigious, more experienced, older and more traditional, i.e. those most likely to be jurors in contests.
mmmmmbop 3y ago
To me, this just seems like a publicity stunt by the artist. Looking at the other images in the category [0], at least three of them are heavily edited. I see no reason why editing his image with AI-assisted tools should automatically disqualify the artist, unless the contest terms prohibit that, of which I see no mention in the article. 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. [0] https://archive.is/pH3Jb https://archive.is/pH3Jb
- yallpendantools 3y ago
  > I see no reason why editing his image with AI-assisted tools should automatically disqualify the artist, unless the contest terms prohibit that, of which I see no mention in the article. 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.
  - h0l0cube 3y ago
    And he says as much on his own website: > 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/ https://www.eldagsen.com/sony-world-photography-awards-2023/
- klodolph 3y ago
  That's kind of a "tu quoque" analysis of what's going on here. 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.
pleb_nz 3y ago
I wonder if we'll start to see more things where AI is banned in the same way that steroids are banned in sport. Where and how the line would be drawn and you'd enforce it would be interesting discussions though.
- atleastoptimal 3y ago
  How will they enforce it though. Will they require you to send a video of creating the work? What will happen when people can fake that too? Pixel forensics? 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.
  - debugnik 3y ago
    Giving them an environment in which they don't have access to the AI, I guess: Photos must be signed by the camera firmware, digital art must be made with approved tools on a locked-down device or web VM, etc.
redder23 3y ago
Sorry if I am to lazy to look this up but was this competition specifically for "PHOTOGRAPHS" as the capitalized in his statement? If others were heavily modified ... than this seems to point out that this is a flawed competition rule. So they want AI and Photoshop stuff compete with photographs? 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.
enriquto 3y ago
Both photography and image generation by computers are techniques that you can use in the ancient discipline of painting, aka "putting colors on a surface to produce a visual effect". Since its invention, photography has been a staple tecnhique for many painters. I don't see why "AI" should be any different. 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.
throwaway675309 3y ago
Honestly this speaks more about their so-called competition for this to have taken first prize, because that "photograph" has some pretty big AI generation red flags in it, including the terribly smudged and distorted hands.
- nstart 3y ago
  Absolutely. This was the case even when the artist won that art competition using midjourney. The overall mood of the picture was nice but the moment you looked at it a little more closely, everything that wasn’t the immediate subjects kind of warped into nonsense. Would love to hear from the judges of these competitions on how they select winning entries
pimlottc 3y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35569090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35569090
ddoice 3y ago
Prompt or it didn't happen
onetokeoverthe 3y ago
[dead]
lastairbender 3y ago
Amazing. 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.
juliangmp 3y ago
The fact that the award host just pretends this never happened goes to show that the guy really had a point...
gumballindie 3y ago
Art has just been obliterated. The sheer amount of stolen content has put the very artists that made it out of their jobs. Open source devs are next. The only ones that will survive will be those where data is scarce and as such cant be used for much “training”. Unless regulation to enforce licensing terms is implemented people will be out of a job in 1-2 years.
t0bia_s 3y ago
Problem here is not an AI generated photo. Problem is contest in art in general. 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?

207 points by kyleyeats 3y ago

Maybe contests should ask themselves if they need to change. Handing out prices for creations at the event. 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.

yborg 3y ago
It's more like having a contest that issues a prize to the person that hired the best artist to create a work. I guess it's as valid as any other arbitrary competition; we issue prizes to the owner of the fastest horse in a race regardless of who rides it.
hgsgm 3y ago
The contest sponsor sells cameras. So... maybe the whole business needs to change, if reality is obsolete.

eimrine 3y ago

Just look at the most left hand, it is so crooked. But at least 2 of 3 hands are correct which is more than lucky based on my experience with stable diffusion. Usually the result is something like this image hosted on twitter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32875215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32875215

brucethemoose2 3y ago
You can get them looking pretty good with inpainting (just cut out the hands area), a hands LORA, and a couple of generation attempts.

porbelm 3y ago

What he did was awesome, and the complete silence from the organizers is such a laff, I think they are so effing embarrassed lol

porbelm 3y ago
Just to clarify; I don't think AI-generated images have anything to do in a traditional photography contest. Prompt-creators can create their own festival. With blackjack. And hookers.
- PeterisP 3y ago
  I think it has some conceptual value - if many artists are saying that the ML models can't create real art and only get a mediocre rehash of existing ideas (which by definition can't be better than those ideas), then having the same artists judge whether some piece ML art actually is better than anything the traditional artists submitted kind of brings the theoretical argument down to reality. 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.
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    There's nothing wrong with just automatically dismissing AI created art in the context of a contest. We don't allow horses to enter marathons, because even though they're fast it's not for them. We don't even allow people to use performance enhancing drugs, which might be a closer comparison. Should we "condemn" the judges of chess tournaments for not allowing live coaching and chess AIs?
    - PeterisP 3y ago

Invictus0 3y ago

AI images are not photos, obviously. We've conflated these words for a long time because the only way to create an image was by digitizing light. These AI images have more in common with a collage than a photo.

circuit10 3y ago
I don’t think a collage is the right way to describe it, because it implies that it’s literally parts of the training data copied together which a lot of people think but it’s a lot more indirect than that, but I agree that it’s not a photo because a photo is of a real thing 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

neom 3y ago

I've told the story a few times on HN about the "cheating" in my 2007 Digital Imaging college photography contest for the Digital Imaging program[1]. In our instance, we're a totally (brand new) digital program, and someone combined some framed and created a scene that didn't exist, they shot the scenes separately and combined them. Our prof told folks to f'off when they complained as it was well within the lines. I agreed. That said... 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. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35020010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35020010

hgsgm 3y ago
That's entirely the point of the OP. To promote AI segregation on art contests, and not let AI secretly win every photo contest.
filoleg 3y ago
Agreed. For something like a photography contest, I am surprised they didn't have explicitly defined rules around it, like requiring contestants to provide the original RAW image (as a proof of work), having an explicit list of what is allowed to be tweaked (and nothing else would be allowed) like brightness/color grading/etc.

brucethemoose2 3y ago

Where is the line gonna be drawn? How much of a difference is there between low strength img2img and a "smart" Photoshop filter. Maybe "photography" contests should be more strict, with only specific processing filters allowed.

ghaff 3y ago
A lot of this predates generative AI. I know someone who used to be really into photography competitions and the like and he basically got discouraged because the photos he really worked on to get perfect right out of the camera were suddenly starting to lose to digital photos that had been enhanced in Photoshop in various ways. 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.
- Kye 3y ago
  What wins photography competitions breaks assumptions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcxcGBbLIwk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcxcGBbLIwk 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.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Probably true of a lot of things. Food, theatre, art generally... Well-executed versions of something they've seen a million times before just isn't all that interesting.
Pelayu 3y ago
I've entered photography contests before, and the ones I entered requested the raw file from the camera as well as your final .jpg/.png as a way of proving it was you at that took the image.

readthenotes1 3y ago

[flagged]

lostlogin 3y ago
That sounds like something that would get people fired up.

nbzso 3y ago

It is mind-boggling how the "trends" and the non-stop race for validation make all lose their minds. How on earth a photo contest cannot see the false anatomy of the hands and person behind? Did someone in this concourse is actual photographer? Maybe not. 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.

eimrine 3y ago
Can you describe what is wrong with the person behind? I can clearly see the hands issue and even I can see a strange hair on another person near her left ear. But the person behind seems correct to me.
- smusamashah 3y ago
  Look at the dark eye, an artifact on nose, the lighting on the cheek behind shoulder. Fingers of her hand have abnormal thickness, index finger has very long nail, meaning they are not equal in length.
  - lostlogin 3y ago
    The woman in the foreground seems strangely 2D, like the background woman is holding a cardboard cutout. The background woman is somehow too close. 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.
  - eimrine 3y ago
    Thank you, now I see it all. This artifacts use to rhyme/mimicre with old-photo style and big artifacts on top-left quarter of image so they are not easy to see but now I see a usual stable diffusion style with noticeable disrespect to 3D objects everywhere.

lifeisstillgood 3y ago

There are steps in solutions like this (I would imagine a first being all images are hashed / signed by a key stored on the camera itself, so the orignal raw image can be audited later - this is something that will help more jounralistically than artists but it's relevant) 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)

visarga 3y ago
I somehow feel there are technical reasons why this won't work.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
rendall 3y ago
Auditing data could always be spoofed. There is no technology fix for this. Better just to stick with the social, and tell people that violating the rules will result in disqualification and a ban.
PeterisP 3y ago
How do you tell that some key is stored solely on a particular camera? 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.
- lifeisstillgood 3y ago
  All of that is fair. The secure enclave on an iPhone is only so secure. 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.

wslh 3y ago

Sorry, but I don't understand and I am confused. Did he submit his work in the contest and then refuse the prize ala Sokal [1] because it was generated using AI? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

DangitBobby 3y ago
In the article, he explains his goal was to accelerate the conversation around AI in photography that the field isn't ready to have yet, and didn't want his submission to win.
- hgsgm 3y ago
  Of course he wanted his submission to win. If his submission lost, it wouldn't accelerate the conversation as he hoped. What he didn't want was the prize for a photo contest.
  - DangitBobby 3y ago
    Nitpicking

stavros 3y ago

> PSEUDOMNESIA is the Latin term for pseudo memory 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.

lostlogin 3y ago
It reminded me of the pained actors in the series Berlin, where they are making a movie and and all being overly artistic. Slightly fitting too, though that was set in the ‘20s from memory.
deafpolygon 3y ago
https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100352171 https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority... https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/pseudomnesia https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/pseudomnesi... https://dictionary.apa.org/pseudomemory https://dictionary.apa.org/pseudomemory https://www.dictionary.net/pseudomnesia https://www.dictionary.net/pseudomnesia
- stavros 3y ago
  No need to quote dictionaries for my own language to me.

jorgesborges 3y ago

This may not be photography and it’s certainly controversial given the context, but it’s still interesting, meaningful and “good” art produced by an artist… using AI.

pmoriarty 3y ago

Not surprising. Decent AI generated images tend to be better then those created by your typical artist, and AI image generators in the hands of a good artist can create some incredible work that most human artists will struggle to compete with. Reminds me of those stories of people on horseback trying to race locomotives.

flandish 3y ago

AI art is still 100% art. If any of us ever consider coding artistic and inventive, then AI art is also art. 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?

robocat 3y ago
Ironically photography was historically seen as “not art” by many traditionalists. That background is possibly why a new form of art using different tools triggers them - photographic competitions (anthropomorphically) are maybe just a tad sensitive on the topic? And the artists “performance” at the ceremony is top quality art (humour, satire, insight, and a reflection on our society).

tulio_ribeiro 3y ago

His submission might have won the competition because of his name, if he didn’t use a pseudonym. His name would make them think that the submission was human-made, not AI-generated.

danso 3y ago

A renowned documentary photographer (e.g. worked for Magnum) I've greatly respected recently announced a NFT project consisting of AI-generated photos on the topic of Cuban refugees [0] > 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. [0] https://www.instagram.com/p/CqniSVjrj0h/?hl=en https://www.instagram.com/p/CqniSVjrj0h/?hl=en

WastingMyTime89 3y ago
> And now he's going to torch the integrity of the profession for some NFT profit? 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.
- danso 3y ago
  > the photo is a medium of expression which is not that different from writing something. 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 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.

dalbasal 3y ago

There's an important point to consider. Our ability to detect "real" dialogue, images and whatnot will develop as we go. What fools us now will not fool us as easily in the near future. 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.

tedivm 3y ago

> 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. That is a pretty amazing quote.

tayo42 3y ago
Unless I'm misinterpreting the intent, it doesn't make sense to me. Painting wasn't replaced?
- singpolyma3 3y ago
  As the main "reproduction of reality" it was. No one would take a painted portrait of their dad out and say "this is my dad" anymore
- PeterisP 3y ago
  It kind of did - the vast majority of the jobs done by painters were actually replaced; painting in general and painting as fine art continued on but the vast majority of painting which was done for mundane decorative purposes effectively shrunk away, as did most of the "portraiting" industry; in some cases people still order their portraits (e.g. the gallery of presidents) but is far scarcer and employs far less painters, as for this "job" painting was replaced by photography.

imwillofficial 3y ago

“prompt whispering” sounds like something a tech priest would do.

JoeAltmaier 3y ago

Surely the grotesquely malformed hands was a clue. 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.

brk 3y ago
Hands are notoriously hard to draw/create realistically. This is why so many animated characters only have 3 fingers instead of 4.
tracerbulletx 3y ago
There are plenty of models and workflows now for getting the hands right now and there has been for a few months.
- JoeAltmaier 3y ago
  Perhaps this submission was prior to that, or using an older model.
timetraveller26 3y ago
Hands are really weird if you look at them closely
dkarras 3y ago
maybe it is because I spent a lot of time with AI generated imagery but I would figure notice that this is an AI image right away - even ignoring the hands (the days of us being able to do this by eye is numbered though). Surprised that the jurors in a prestigious photography contest did not figure it out or even suspected.
- PeterisP 3y ago
  I'd assume that there are many people in the art world who have never seriously looked at AI generated imagery - especially the part of community which is more prestigious, more experienced, older and more traditional, i.e. those most likely to be jurors in contests.

mmmmmbop 3y ago

To me, this just seems like a publicity stunt by the artist. Looking at the other images in the category [0], at least three of them are heavily edited. I see no reason why editing his image with AI-assisted tools should automatically disqualify the artist, unless the contest terms prohibit that, of which I see no mention in the article. 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. [0] https://archive.is/pH3Jb https://archive.is/pH3Jb

yallpendantools 3y ago
> I see no reason why editing his image with AI-assisted tools should automatically disqualify the artist, unless the contest terms prohibit that, of which I see no mention in the article. 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.
- h0l0cube 3y ago
  And he says as much on his own website: > 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/ https://www.eldagsen.com/sony-world-photography-awards-2023/
klodolph 3y ago
That's kind of a "tu quoque" analysis of what's going on here. 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.

pleb_nz 3y ago

I wonder if we'll start to see more things where AI is banned in the same way that steroids are banned in sport. Where and how the line would be drawn and you'd enforce it would be interesting discussions though.

atleastoptimal 3y ago
How will they enforce it though. Will they require you to send a video of creating the work? What will happen when people can fake that too? Pixel forensics? 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.
- debugnik 3y ago
  Giving them an environment in which they don't have access to the AI, I guess: Photos must be signed by the camera firmware, digital art must be made with approved tools on a locked-down device or web VM, etc.

redder23 3y ago

Sorry if I am to lazy to look this up but was this competition specifically for "PHOTOGRAPHS" as the capitalized in his statement? If others were heavily modified ... than this seems to point out that this is a flawed competition rule. So they want AI and Photoshop stuff compete with photographs? 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.

enriquto 3y ago

Both photography and image generation by computers are techniques that you can use in the ancient discipline of painting, aka "putting colors on a surface to produce a visual effect". Since its invention, photography has been a staple tecnhique for many painters. I don't see why "AI" should be any different. 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.

throwaway675309 3y ago

Honestly this speaks more about their so-called competition for this to have taken first prize, because that "photograph" has some pretty big AI generation red flags in it, including the terribly smudged and distorted hands.

nstart 3y ago
Absolutely. This was the case even when the artist won that art competition using midjourney. The overall mood of the picture was nice but the moment you looked at it a little more closely, everything that wasn’t the immediate subjects kind of warped into nonsense. Would love to hear from the judges of these competitions on how they select winning entries

pimlottc 3y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35569090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35569090

ddoice 3y ago

Prompt or it didn't happen

onetokeoverthe 3y ago

[dead]

lastairbender 3y ago

Amazing. 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.

juliangmp 3y ago

The fact that the award host just pretends this never happened goes to show that the guy really had a point...

gumballindie 3y ago

Art has just been obliterated. The sheer amount of stolen content has put the very artists that made it out of their jobs. Open source devs are next. The only ones that will survive will be those where data is scarce and as such cant be used for much “training”. Unless regulation to enforce licensing terms is implemented people will be out of a job in 1-2 years.

t0bia_s 3y ago

Problem here is not an AI generated photo. Problem is contest in art in general. 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?