AI generated image wins Sony Photography Award

Σ OI Σ said

me too, very pro AI (just being nice because AI will rule over us in the near future and anyone who was mean to it now is going to paying later)

I was referring to those that are dead set against AI.

Im not seeing those guys in this thread, but for sure they are in others lol. Im shocked at those that don't want to even see it in the forums full stop, it's probably the biggest issues facing photography ever! 

Not bad, for a Sony competition.

AI hasn't mastered Canon Colour Science yet I see.

;)

Perception said

Σ OI Σ said

me too, very pro AI (just being nice because AI will rule over us in the near future and anyone who was mean to it now is going to paying later)

I was referring to those that are dead set against AI.

Im not seeing those guys in this thread, but for sure they are in others lol. Im shocked at those that don't want to even see it in the forums full stop, it's probably the biggest issues facing photography ever! 

It’s one of the biggest issues facing many aspects of modern life, not just photography.

Lol, is it a joke or a viral about Sony? AI or any manipulation is not Art. Art belongs from humanity since cave pictures.

Origins aside, I'm more confused why this image won the category. It's seriously 'off' in a number of respects.

Such competitions will be mostly meaningless in the future but it's a shame that the issue wasn't highlighted by better AI.

Lews said

Origins aside, I'm more confused why this image won the category. It's seriously 'off' in a number of respects.

Such competitions will be mostly meaningless in the future but it's a shame that the issue wasn't highlighted by better AI.

Art is about expressing an idea. That image consisted of a better idea than the others, and expressed it clearly - even if it was ultimately a pot noodle microwave meal affair 😆

Σ OI Σ said

me too, very pro AI (just being nice because AI will rule over us in the near future and anyone who was mean to it now is going to paying later)

I was referring to those that are dead set against AI.

Excellent 😊 The best politicians always win the long game - just ask Boris Johnson 😏

We’ve been trolled at the ultimate level

However, it’s a photography award and the image is not a photograph so needs to be disqualified

A R G E N T U M said

Lews said

Origins aside, I'm more confused why this image won the category. It's seriously 'off' in a number of respects.

Such competitions will be mostly meaningless in the future but it's a shame that the issue wasn't highlighted by better AI.

Art is about expressing an idea. That image consisted of a better idea than the others, and expressed it clearly - even if it was ultimately a pot noodle microwave meal affair 😆

I probably wouldn't have selected it as a winner in an art competition, but I haven't seen all the other entries; of the shortlisted ones shown on the 2023 Creative Gallery page, it didn't stand out to me as a clear winner.

But it's not a photograph, and Sony World Photography Awards contest isn't a general art competition, and I would expect that to hold true even for the Open category, especially given the multiple and various references to  "photographers", "Images must be taken", and similar.

Additionally, this particular one seems to technically violate the Open category overall rule 4.3: "You confirm that each person depicted in the Entry has granted permission to be portrayed as shown." Given that the persons depicted don't actually exist, they can't have granted permission. (They can't have objected, either, but that's not how the rule was written.)

Whether an image comprised of multiple other photographs is a photograph is an entirely different question, worthy of its own discussion (and has had lots of that discussion in the last few decades). The same for various types of manipulations on single or composited photographs. (CGI elements combined with photographs are another open question, but, again, one that is discussed at length elsewhere.)

This image might be artistic. It might be art. It might be a photorealistic illustration. It might be many things, but it's something that contained nothing either captured by a camera [real or virtual] onto any media nor using light itself (such as a photogram, and that makes it difficult (for me) to justify calling it a photograph.

Edited by Kevin Connery

Kevin Connery said

Whether an image comprised of multiple other photographs is a photograph is an entirely different question, worthy of its own discussion (and has had lots of that discussion in the last few decades). The same for various types of manipulations on single or composited photographs. (CGI elements combined with photographs are another open question, but, again, one that is discussed at length elsewhere.)

 

It's a bit of a stretch, but you might argue that this image is comprised of other photographs - after all, what was the AI trained on?

... and some interesting commentary here: https://petapixel.com/2023/04/14/artist-refuses-prize-after-his-ai-image-wins-at-top-photo-contest/

Gothic Image said

Kevin Connery said

Whether an image comprised of multiple other photographs is a photograph is an entirely different question, worthy of its own discussion (and has had lots of that discussion in the last few decades). The same for various types of manipulations on single or composited photographs. (CGI elements combined with photographs are another open question, but, again, one that is discussed at length elsewhere.)

 

It's a bit of a stretch, but you might argue that this image is comprised of other photographs - after all, what was the AI trained on?

That argument only holds true if you consider individual pixels to be 'other photographs'; training data as such isn't present in the results of a GAN, diffusion models, or VAE. It's not a copy/paste process at all. They don't use existing parts of other photographs from the training set; they generate sets of pixels based on what they've "learned" from the training data. 

That said, if Eldagsen did use inpainting or outpainting based on a photograph, it becomes even murkier. He noted he'd used both in- and out-painting, but he didn't reference what the core for that work came from.

Kevin Connery said

That argument only holds true if you consider individual pixels to be 'other photographs'; training data as such isn't present in the results of a GAN, diffusion models, or VAE. It's not a copy/paste process at all. They don't use existing parts of other photographs from the training set; they generate sets of pixels based on what they've "learned" from the training data. 

That said, if Eldagsen did use inpainting or outpainting based on a photograph, it becomes even murkier. He noted he'd used both in- and out-painting, but he didn't reference what the core for that work came from.

Agreed - it gets more and more murky.  Eldagsen obviously didn't just give the AI some magic words and stand back.  There's "traditional" photo manipulation in there, too.

Kevin Connery said

A R G E N T U M said

Lews said

Origins aside, I'm more confused why this image won the category. It's seriously 'off' in a number of respects.

Such competitions will be mostly meaningless in the future but it's a shame that the issue wasn't highlighted by better AI.

Art is about expressing an idea. That image consisted of a better idea than the others, and expressed it clearly - even if it was ultimately a pot noodle microwave meal affair 😆

I probably wouldn't have selected it as a winner in an art competition, but I haven't seen all the other entries; of the shortlisted ones shown on the 2023 Creative Gallery page, it didn't stand out to me as a clear winner.

But it's not a photograph, and Sony World Photography Awards contest isn't a general art competition, and I would expect that to hold true even for the Open category, especially given the multiple and various references to  "photographers", "Images must be taken", and similar.

Additionally, this particular one seems to technically violate the Open category overall rule 4.3: "You confirm that each person depicted in the Entry has granted permission to be portrayed as shown." Given that the persons depicted don't actually exist, they can't have granted permission. (They can't have objected, either, but that's not how the rule was written.)

Whether an image comprised of multiple other photographs is a photograph is an entirely different question, worthy of its own discussion (and has had lots of that discussion in the last few decades). The same for various types of manipulations on single or composited photographs. (CGI elements combined with photographs are another open question, but, again, one that is discussed at length elsewhere.)

This image might be artistic. It might be art. It might be a photorealistic illustration. It might be many things, but it's something that contained nothing either captured by a camera [real or virtual] onto any media nor using light itself (such as a photogram, and that makes it difficult (for me) to justify calling it a photograph.

 

Edited by Kevin Connery

Reminds of that poem by Rudyard Kipling - The Conundrum of the Workshops

https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_conundrum.htm 

I like the irony that a major camera manufacturer's photographic competition was won by an image which didn't involve a camera 😂😁😂

They'll have to use that to advertise their products:

"Sony Alpha - you don't need it to be a winner - so don't buy one..." 😎😎

"Winners don't use Sony"

"Buy Sony and be a loser..." 😆🤣🤣

Edited by A R G E N T U M

Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of a photograph is as follows: ​

‘a picture that is made by using a camera that stores images in digital form or that has a film sensitive to light inside it’

The said competition winner is not a photograph so therefore should be disqualified.