Hauntingly realistic AI-generated images are winning photo contests and generative AI tools are powering our favorite photo editors. A flood of AI-generated images has made it virtually impossible to know what is and isn’t real.
However, there is finally a story that photographers can laugh about – a victory for people, if you will.
A surreal but completely real photo called ‘Flaminingone’ by Miles Astray (real name, I’m not kidding) impressed the judges of the prestigious Photo competition from 1839 to get bronze and claim the popular vote prize, which comes with a cash prize. The problem for the contest organizers is that Astray’s winning image is included in a newly formed AI category.
The surreal image above was deemed so unreal that the astute jury, which included people from The New York Times and Getty Images, was duped and voted for it, as did the audience; awards that were subsequently stripped from Astray after the true nature of the statue became clear.
The image appears to be a simple holiday snapshot of an apparently decapitated flamingo, taken on a white sandy beach in Aruba. It captures the moment when the flamingo is preening, which is why its head and neck are hidden. This is a real subject, a real place, and a real moment, completely beating out algorithm-based, AI-generated entries.
Astray said, “It occurred to me that I could twist this story inside and out as only a human can and will, by submitting a real photo to an AI competition. Of course, I deliberately chose a photo that is so surreal, to the point of unbelievable, that it can easily be attributed to the presence of AI.”
It turns the narrative of the 2024 photo contest on its head, and the contest organizers released this statement:
“Our competition categories are specifically defined to ensure fairness and clarity for all participants. Each category has different criteria that entrant images must meet. His entry did not meet the requirements for the AI-generated images category. We understand that was the point, but we don’t want to stop other artists from winning in the AI category.”
“We hope this will bring awareness and a message of hope to other photographers concerned about AI.” On Astray’s bloghe said that the contest organizers had “a surprising response that really made my day,” and “I entered this actual photo into the AI category of the 1839 Awards to prove that human-generated content has lost its relevance lost, that Mother Nature and her human interpreters can still beat the machine, and that creativity and emotion are more than just a series of numbers.”
Astray’s sentiment reminds me of Nikon Peru’s playful “natural intelligence” campaign featuring a series of alien landscapes you might find in real life in Peru, along with the kind of word prompts you would use in an AI generator to create such create striking images.
We can enjoy this story simply for what it is – a victory for humans – but there is also a broader story at play here: the industry is turning against AI and putting mechanisms in place to identify AI content, but real photos can too become a victim. .
Instagram tags real photos as ‘Made with AI’ (while admitting the system is easy to circumvent with fake images), while an iPhone shot was disqualified from a contest for looking too fake, and now this: another in a catalog of stories that proves how difficult it is to determine what is real and what is fake – but once Content Credentials is effectively rolled out, photographers can prove its authenticity.
Photo competitions are adapting to an AI future in an effort to distinguish fake from real – the fact that there is an AI category in the 1839 photo competition is a case in point – and there is still hope for real photography. This time it’s a victory for humans versus machines in what has sometimes felt like an otherwise one-sided battle since generative AI hit the mainstream.
I wonder what could be the next step in the photo contest story: a contest that uses AI to judge entries and select the winners? God, I hope not – that would be the darkest twist of all.