In the past, photography competitions have already been fooled by AI-generated photos. This time it’s the opposite. A photographer named Miles Astray placed third in the 1839 Awards competition last week, in the IA category, by submitting an image of a pink flamingo named “FLAMINGONE”. However, this work was not generated by a tool allowing the generation of images by artificial intelligence, such as DALL-E, Midjourney or even Stable Diffusion. This is indeed a real photo taken with a camera on the Dutch island of Aruba in the Caribbean Sea. Winning the public vote award, it shows a flamingo scratching its belly, creating the optical illusion that the bird has no head.
After revealing the true nature of his photo, the young artist was disqualified. “Which is a completely justified and fair decision, which I expected and which I fully support,” reacted the photographer in a publication on his site. The organizers informed him that his photo “did not meet the requirements of the AI-generated image category.” “We understand that this was the intention, but we do not want to prevent other artists from having a chance to win in the AI-generated images category,” they added.
“Obviously, misleading the jury posed an ethical problem, which I did not take lightly. But I hoped that professionals and the public would find this AI blow and deception less ethically disturbing than deception generated by artificial intelligence,” Miles Astray wrote. “I submitted this real photo in the AI category of the 1839 Awards, to prove that human-made content has not lost its relevance, that Mother Nature and her human performers can still beat the machine, and that creativity and emotion cannot be reduced to a simple series of numbers,” explained the photographer. And to specify that the co-founder and director of the competition, Lily Fierman, told him in an e-mail that she appreciated the strength of his message: “We hope that this will raise awareness (and bring a message of hope) to the many photographers who are “worried about AI,” she wrote.
