Do you think you can recognize a photograph and an image created with AI? Some certainly didn’t succeed. “Flamingone”, a photo by Miles Astray that portrays a flamingo bending its neck to hide its head under its body, won the People’s Vote award and the bronze award in the category IA of the photography competition This year’s “1839 Color Photography Contest” (“Named after the year the photographic medium was first made available to the public,” the website explains). It’s a shame, however, that the photograph was disqualified because it was one real photo and not generated with AI.
“I wanted to show that nature can still beat the machine and that there is still merit in the real work of real creatives,” the photographer told PetaPixel. “After seeing recent cases of AI-generated images beating real photos in contests, I started thinking to turn history and its implications on its head by submitting a real photo to an artificial intelligence competition.”
The “clash” between AI and photography in recent years
To understand what Miles Astray is referring to, you need to know for example that in 2022, AI artist Jason Allen won first prize in the Colorado State Fair art competition. Obviously the whole thing caused a scandal and when Allen was asked what he thought his response was: “I think backlash is normal for any major technological advance that affects art. As in the case of the camera, which in past threatened portraitists, where the photographer ‘didn’t have to do anything except press a button’ Of course, now we know it’s ridiculous, but it takes time to accept new advances in art.”
Presenting an opposing point of view, in 2023 Boris Eldagsen won an award at the Sony World Photography Awards before revealing that his image had been created by artificial intelligence. “Images created by artificial intelligence and photography should not compete with each other in an award like this,” he said at the time after being awarded. “They are different entities. AI is not photography. Therefore I will not accept the award.”
No one had been able to distinguish an AI-generated image from a real photograph and now the exact opposite has happened.
AI is increasingly central in the world of video games and there are various fears, for example the fact that Artificial Intelligence in video games will cause layoffs: the CEO of Take-Two, however, has clear ideas.
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