Photographer Disqualified From AI Image Contest After Winning With Real Photo

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Doug

Doug

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Photographers fool AI judges! My take is that photographers prove that humans are still competitive, at least when they are the judges. Any prognostication for how much longer this will be the case?

petapixel.com

Photographer Disqualified From AI Image Contest After Winning With Real Photo

The photographers strike back.
petapixel.com petapixel.com

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bleirer said:
Why would someone enter an ai contest with a real image? Seems like cheating if the rules were clear. Would be like entering a stock car race with parts that were not permitted by the rules.
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The fact that he won makes it the greatest troll in recent years.
Making an "AI photo contest" is absurd in the first place, picking a real photo for the win is monty python level absurd and it's remarkable and funny.
 
Just seems like cheating to me. Submit something that clearly is outside the rules. Remove a branch and submit to a contest that says no alterations allowed. Why?
 
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AI confuses me. I like looking at watches. This is a wonderful site where exceptional people tell stories: https://www.webofstories.com/play/george.daniels/28
George Daniels in my opinion is a 'magician'.

Mark Kac:
In science, as well as in other fields of human endeavor, there are two kinds of geniuses: the “ordinary” and the “magicians.” An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what he has done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. They are, to use mathematical jargon, in the orthogonal complement of where we are and the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark. They seldom, if ever, have students because they cannot be emulated and it must be terribly frustrating for a brilliant young mind to cope with the mysterious ways in which the magician’s mind works. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber. Hans Bethe, whom [Freeman] Dyson considers to be his teacher, is an “ordinary genius,”. . . . (Quoted from Enigmas of Chance: An Autobiography, by Mark Kac. Harper and Row. 1985. p. xxv.)
During my honours year of study I was fortunate to meet Jaakko Hinkikka. I asked him if he invented a logic or discovered it. He said it would take too long to answer. [ I'm no logician ]
Anyway to cut a long esoteric post short when someone knows what intelligence is then they can try making an artificial intelligence.

PS If AI was what a lot of people think it is it would be able to create an escapement more efficient than George Daniels' co-axial.
en.wikipedia.org

Coaxial escapement - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
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bleirer said:
Just seems like cheating to me. Submit something that clearly is outside the rules. Remove a branch and submit to a contest that says no alterations allowed. Why?
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Trying to make a kind of protest is probably a big part of it. I would argue that calling something a "photography" contest when it's supposed to be AI images is absurd and in a certain sense insulting. If you want to have an AI image contest... OK, I suppose. Categorizing it along with photography and giving it the name is I think an issue and I support a protest against this.
 
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SCoombs said:
Trying to make a kind of protest is probably a big part of it. I would argue that calling something a "photography" contest when it's supposed to be AI images is absurd and in a certain sense insulting. If you want to have an AI image contest... OK, I suppose. Categorizing it along with photography and giving it the name is I think an issue and I support a protest against this.
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I support it a thousand times over! Kudos to the photographer who has given me hope for humanity today...
 
It's an art form in itself to conceive of and instruct the ai to produce a certain image. Similar argument when photography became more available and the painters felt threatened that it would somehow replace them. Still both painting and the interloper photography still exist side by side and the ideas generated even support each other. The sky is not falling.
 
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I keep seeing these AI "birds" on FB without disclaimers and folks continually replying, thinking they are real. I usually reply with something like "pretty, but I'm not a fan of AI generated birds", but that's just me. Post them, but ID them.
 
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I absolutely understand people being against AI in photo contests of real photography.

But it seems more than silly to do this—he just wasted a lot of people's time to make a point we all already know, and pissed off a lot of people to do that.

There is a place for AI. Let them do it. Mock it from the sidelines if you must, but don't enter the race with false intension—it's disingenuous.

Chris
 
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Not A Speck Of Cereal said:
I absolutely understand people being against AI in photo contests of real photography.

But it seems more than silly to do this—he just wasted a lot of people's time to make a point we all already know, and pissed off a lot of people to do that.

There is a place for AI. Let them do it. Mock it from the sidelines if you must, but don't enter the race with false intension—it's disingenuous.

Chris
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Obviously, he disagrees-- and I agree with him. If everyone understood his point-- which isn't silly at all-- then he wouldn't need to make it.
 
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peachfront said:
Obviously, he disagrees-- and I agree with him. If everyone understood his point-- which isn't silly at all-- then he wouldn't need to make it.
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He can make his point in any number of ways that don't involve lying to someone and wasting all of their time AND the time of the other participants.

"If everyone understood his point": probably everyone, or most people, fully understand his point—they just don't all agree. And I certainly don't agree with his methods.

Chris
 
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Not A Speck Of Cereal said:
He can make his point in any number of ways that don't involve lying to someone and wasting all of their time AND the time of the other participants.

"If everyone understood his point": probably everyone, or most people, fully understand his point—they just don't all agree. And I certainly don't agree with his methods.

Chris
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I think it's quite arguable that the entire essence of AI image generation is to lie to people, so this criticism of this photographer's methods is going to fall on an awful lot of deaf ears.
 
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SCoombs said:
I think it's quite arguable that the entire essence of AI image generation is to lie to people, so this criticism of this photographer's methods is going to fall on an awful lot of deaf ears.
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Not all of AI is "image generation"** and the contest this guy duped was not lying to anybody. It was quite clearly labeled as a contest for those using AI tools. Because there are many valid professional fields using AI image generation (in part or whole) in their works.

** There are AI generative images being created at a text prompt. There are genuine camera-captured images being processed with some AI tools that modify portions of the image. Then there's everything in-between.

If your argument is that all AI modified images should be labeled as such, you'll get no argument from me. But simply the act of using AI tools is not lying to anybody.

Note: I'm aware there's a flood of people posting AI generated images to social media and not stating it as AI. The problem here are the liars, not the tools they use.

Chris

PS: I have yet to create a single AI generative image, and I've not even used the AI remote tool in Photoshop. However, I understand that Adobe calls some of their new non-generative tools "AI assisted", such as some selection tools and their AI DeNoise tool (which doesn't generate image portions in the least bit, but supposedly used AI-learned algorithms to process noise).
 
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bleirer said:
It's an art form in itself to conceive of and instruct the ai to produce a certain image. Similar argument when photography became more available and the painters felt threatened that it would somehow replace them. Still both painting and the interloper photography still exist side by side and the ideas generated even support each other. The sky is not falling.
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Two points here.

First, saying that it's an art form to tell the AI what to do is like saying that if I hire a painter and tell them what I would like to see painted that I'm the artist. It's like saying that when a police sketch artist - amazingly talented people, given what they can accomplish, by the way - draws a picture of a suspect that the person giving the description is the artist. It's like saying that if someone hires you to photograph their wedding or take a family photo or senior portraits and they tell you what they want that they're somehow an artist for it.

Now maybe I can meet you part of the way here and say that I'd agree that there can be a certain skill involved with getting an AI to generate the image you want. I wouldn't by any stretch call this a form of art, though. It might be akin to having better skills at computer programming than somebody else, and absolutely there is a talent and a skill to that kind of thing. I greatly respect and admire people who excel at a skill like computer programming and especially when you look at the earlier days of the IT era in the 1980s or early to mid 1990s (and probably today as well, but I am not as familiar with that0 there are some particular programmers who stand out for having been able to get way, way more out of the technology available than anyone else because of all their clearly superior skill. It's a real thing and deserving of respect! - but I would never talk about this in the same way I'd talk about art.

Second, I'll repeat what I said above: the biggest issue here is categorizing and especially naming this as photography. Sure, it's true that at one time photography burst onto the scene occupied by painters, but we do have the word photography these days rather than just calling photographers painters. Yes, yes... most of us know the origin of the word "photography" as coming from the words for drawing and light, but I think it would be a bit pedantic to focus on the etymology. The point is that when photography entered the world for the first time it was clearly distinguished as its own thing and nobody would ever confuse a photo for a painting, whereas in our current world where AI image generation has come on the scene it is not only in practice but to a significant degree even in its purpose being treated as something equivalent and ultimately intended to replace real photos. That's a big difference.
 
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Not A Speck Of Cereal said:
Not all of AI is "image generation"** and the contest this guy duped was not lying to anybody. It was quite clearly labeled as a contest for those using AI tools. Because there are many valid professional fields using AI image generation (in part or whole) in their works.

** There are AI generative images being created at a text prompt. There are genuine camera-captured images being processed with some AI tools that modify portions of the image. Then there's everything in-between.

If your argument is that all AI modified images should be labeled as such, you'll get no argument from me. But simply the act of using AI tools is not lying to anybody.

Note: I'm aware there's a flood of people posting AI generated images to social media and not stating it as AI. The problem here are the liars, not the tools they use.

Chris

PS: I have yet to create a single AI generative image, and I've not even used the AI remote tool in Photoshop. However, I understand that Adobe calls some of their new non-generative tools "AI assisted", such as some selection tools and their AI DeNoise tool (which doesn't generate image portions in the least bit, but supposedly used AI-learned algorithms to process noise).
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Would you not agree that the goal of the people developing AI image generation tools is for the tools to achieve the capability of creating something indistinguishable from reality?
 
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It seems to me that no matter where one stands in terms of Ai usage it will ultimately come down to an individual’s choice to decide where it fits or does not fit into their personal perspective. Whether one approves or not Ai is here to stay and will only get more capable as time goes on. We each will have to decide what we will use or not use. Personally I don’t hesitate to use Ai to retouch in PS but avoid using it on the main subject. I also don’t do contests and am not a professional who may need to worry about where a tool like Ai fits in or not. If somebody wants to make a lion with a peacocks tail or whatever, go for it.
 
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