The third prize in the AI photography contest organized by The 1839 Awards has had to be cancelled, after it was discovered that The photo was not taken by AI, but by a human photographer. The world upside down…
The 1839 Awards photography awards “celebrate the photography of those who use the camera as an artistic medium.” To avoid problems, they have several categories for human photographers, and a photographic prize for creations of artificial intelligence.
The contest has rules prohibiting the use of artificial intelligence in the human categories: “it reserves the right to request proof that the image has not been generated by AI.” However, in the AI contest, they forgot to put one like “reserves the right to request proof that the image has not been generated by a human”…
The human who won a photo contest for AI
In the mentioned photo contest for AI, the third prize went to the photo FLAMINGONE, presented by photographer Miles Astray. This is the “headless” flamingo that you can see in the opening photo of the news. It also won the audience award.
After hearing the jury’s decision, Miles Astray acknowledged on his blog that The photo had not been taken by an AI, but by himself on a beach in Aruba, in the Caribbean.
Its goal was to “demonstrate that human-created content has not lost its relevance, that Mother Nature and its human interpreters can still defeat the machine, and that creativity and emotion are more than just a string of digits.” .
After knowing the “trap”, The jury of The 1839 Awards has withdrawn human photography from the competitiontaking away that third prize.
Miles Astray is one of many photographers and artists who claim the effort, talent, imagination and technique of these human professionals, compared to the calculation capacity of AI.
As he says on his blog, to take the photo of the headless flamingo he had to travel to Aruba, look for a beach with flamingos, get up at 5 in the morning to avoid people, and wait for a certain amount of light, and the exact moment for the flamingo to hide its head in its feathers.
If that photo had been created by an AI, it would have taken five seconds to put together a few pixels“chains of ones and zeros”, as Miles Astray says, to create a flamenco that does not exist, obtained from training with human photos, among which there could even be some of his own.
A human photograph is a moment of life, the immortalization of something real, with a real light, and a technique and effort that requires years of study. Even traveling to that specific place and situation. An AI photo is just pixels stacked together by a neural network, based on its training. It has great technological merit, without a doubt, but, Does it also have artistic merit?
The human photographer who boycotted a photo contest for AI with a photo taken by him is already a hero for his professional colleagues. It is a battle that has only just begun.
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Tags: photography, Artificial intelligence, Photo camera, Photo retouching
