The world upside down. If until now we had been shocked by images generated with Artificial Intelligence that sneaked into real photography contests, in the recent 1839 Color Photography Awards the opposite has happened: a photograph has won first prize in the category dedicated to AI images.
It is a small revenge plotted by the photographer Miles Astray who, as he explained to Petapixel, I was a little tired of seeing how artificial images managed to prevail over photographs in different contests. So he decided to do just the opposite.
And it worked. His beautiful snapshot of a flamingo in a landscape of faded colors took third place in the AI category of this contest and won in the popular vote.
It was not so much about deceiving the jury, made up of professionals with long careers, but rather about sending a message of encouragement to photographers who feel threatened by the advances of AI, Astray explained.
The photograph that could effectively pass for an AI image – with all the good and bad that that entails, by the way – was automatically disqualified from the contest when the cheating became known.
The story, of course, has been reproduced by dozens of media that do not hesitate to use AI images to save having to pay for photographs. And, apparently, they have not understood very well the underlying message that the protagonist of this ingenious deception intended to convey.
In any case, this is the first case of a photograph posing as an AI image and not the other way around. Something that, in the reverse order, has already happened on different occasions and caused such notable cases as that of the Sony World Photography Awards 2023 when one of those generated images was awarded and is even included in the catalog of winners of that edition.
