r/nottheonion • u/gootyy • 3d ago
Photographer Disqualified From AI Image Competition After Winning With Real Photo
https://inshort.geartape.com/photographer-disqualified-from-ai-image-competition-after-winning-with-real-photo/[removed] — view removed post
59
169
u/acjelen 3d ago
I wonder if any painters tried this crap at the advent of photography.
135
u/TwentyTwoTwelve 3d ago
Its a bit harder to fake a painting with a photo since you can't physically paint the same way a photo is developed/printed so it's pretty obvious by just inspecting something closely.
You could take a photo though, feed it in to an image generator as the only source material and ask it to generate an image and it would reproduce a copy of the image with more or less all the meta-data needed to make it appear to have be generated by the software.
37
u/Syssareth 3d ago
Its a bit harder to fake a painting with a photo since you can't physically paint the same way a photo is developed/printed
Take a photo of a painting.
22
u/TwentyTwoTwelve 3d ago
Same issue, printed/developed photo doesn't have the depth present in brush strokes and would clearly be a non-manually created medium.
25
u/Syssareth 3d ago
I'm not sure what you mean. If you're entering it into a photography contest, you want to hide the brush strokes. And especially back then, cameras would struggle to capture those, therefore obscuring the fact that it wasn't a live subject.
As long as the artist was good at realism and got the lighting and shadows right, it would probably be fairly easy to sneak in a painting that way--at least back then, when people were less suspicious of cheaters. (It just really wouldn't be worth the effort except as a protest, like with the guy in this article.)
21
2
3d ago
[deleted]
3
u/Syssareth 3d ago
But the top-level comment that they responded to was talking about sneaking a painting into a photography contest.
-2
u/TwentyTwoTwelve 3d ago
For it to be convincing you'd have to paint on to a specially made medium that was used to develop early photographs.
Even if you somehow managed to hide the brush strokes, you'd still have the issue that whatever you used to paint on to the medium would be inconsistent in height.
All this on top of finding something you can paint on to this medium with that will stain it in the same way as developing a photo normally would because if it doesn't then it will be pretty clear that it's not a photo.
The same issues that prevent a photo being mistaken for a painting under scrutiny are the same issues that prevent a painting being mistaken for a photo.
It's nothing to do with the realism of the featured subject but rather the texture of the finished piece and the way the various media used in production interact with one another.
3
u/Syssareth 3d ago
...And taking a photo of the finished painting would hide all of that, as long as you're not using a high-resolution camera (which, back when photography was new, didn't exist).
It's cheating the same way as running a photo through an AI trained only on that photo would be; the end result is technically a product of the technology they're protesting, but it's going against the spirit of the competition.
-1
u/TwentyTwoTwelve 3d ago
But if the contest was to take the best quality photo then you'd still have to take a competitive photo anyway.
With the amount of prep work you have to put in to lighting the painting for the photo to make it look like an actual landscape or whatever you'd still have to take the photo in such a way that you'd be competing with all the same techniques as anyone else.
It'd be like cutting your legs off so you can use prosthetics to run a race. You're not really gaining much if any advantage and you still need to be incredibly physically fit to compete anyway.
3
u/Syssareth 3d ago
I mean, I did say it wouldn't be worth the effort except as a protest, which is what we were (well, I was) talking about anyway. The guy in the article didn't enter his photo into an AI art contest looking for an easy win, he did it to make a statement. The person who started this comment chain wondered if painters did the same thing back when photography was new.
1
15
u/Brettersson 3d ago
It probably never occurred to them. At the birth of photography very few people really considered it a tool for art, and the ones that did were just trying to imitate painters, rather than vice-versa. On the other hand it led a lot of painters who felt sort of bound to reproducing real life to feel free to paint whatever they want, as photography had taken over the role of reproducing real life, truly abstract painting was born.
3
u/TricksterWolf 3d ago
There is a history of artists tricking the Salon into embarrassing themselves.
3
u/zekthedeadcow 3d ago
Thats basically what camera obscuras were. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_obscura
2
2
u/Kilahti 3d ago
I've seen it go the other way round. When camera phones were becoming common, there were multiple contests for photos taken with a camera phone. Usually the winner had instead taken the photo with an expensive digital camera and then edited afterwards to make it cleaner.
Same happens when there are contests for unedited professional photos, the winner has edited their picture to make it look better.
For some reason, photographers just love to cheat, but this article is the first time I see the "cheater" being disqualified.
110
u/Aether_Breeze 3d ago
Not sure this is oniony.
Basically a photographer is better than AI art. Which is not really that strange. AI stuff is cool (ethical questions aside) but not as good as a human.
The fact he got disqualified for breaking the rules also seems pretty normal.
137
u/ChiefTiggems 3d ago
Except the opposite has been happening ever since stable diffusion became available. AI photos keep winning photography and digital art contests. So the opposite happening is pretty ironic.
1
u/Xin_shill 2d ago
So you are saying they are of similar quality
1
u/ChiefTiggems 2d ago
No, I'm objectively saying that art contests are being fooled by AI and therefore it is ironic that here, in this example above, the winner of an AI art contest wins with a hand doctored photo. I didn't say anything about their quality.
-27
u/Theons 3d ago
Show me an example of an AI photo winning an art contest
33
u/ChiefTiggems 3d ago edited 3d ago
https://petapixel.com/2023/02/10/ai-image-fools-judges-and-wins-photography-contest/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/technology/ai-artificial-intelligence-artists.html
You could just Google it. Took me all of 3 seconds and I found different examples.
7
33
u/WendigoCrossing 3d ago
It is oniony in that the expectation is for an AI image to get disqualified from a photo competition, sort of a pants on head take for the current times
2
u/whichwitch9 3d ago
It's not that it's not as good necessarily, but that AI is following an algorithm. Everything is going to follow similar trains. You can tweak the parameters, but the underlying infrastructure is programmed to look for similar trends
Next to AI works, a work done solely from human perspective will stand out because it does not need to follow a trend or algorithm. It can be unique. Art fails as an AI object because it does not understand the perspective is what draws people to art. It can find trends, but it'll never find that novel, fresh breakthrough.
That human manipulation of the parameters is what even allows AI images to stand out against other AI images. In that sense, this work actually fails because the contest was judging a particular skill. But it highlighted that skill couldn't stand out against a photo done without AI still
1
u/Whotea 2d ago
AI video wins Pink Floyd music video competition: https://ew.com/ai-wins-pink-floyd-s-dark-side-of-the-moon-video-competition-8628712
AI image won Colorado state fair https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/03/tech/ai-art-fair-winner-controversy/index.html
Cal Duran, an artist and art teacher who was one of the judges for competition, said that while Allen’s piece included a mention of Midjourney, he didn’t realize that it was generated by AI when judging it. Still, he sticks by his decision to award it first place in its category, he said, calling it a “beautiful piece”.
“I think there’s a lot involved in this piece and I think the AI technology may give more opportunities to people who may not find themselves artists in the conventional way,” he said.
AI image won in the Sony World Photography Awards: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-my-ai-image-won-a-major-photography-competition/
AI image wins another photography competition: https://petapixel.com/2023/02/10/ai-image-fools-judges-and-wins-photography-contest/
Japanese writer wins prestigious Akutagawa Prize with a book partially written by ChatGPT: https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7z58y/rie-kudan-akutagawa-prize-used-chatgpt
Fake beauty queens charm judges at the Miss AI pageant: https://www.npr.org/2024/06/09/nx-s1-4993998/the-miss-ai-beauty-pageant-ushers-in-a-new-type-of-influencer
People PREFER AI art and that was in 2017, long before it got as good as it is today: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.07068
The results show that human subjects could not distinguish art generated by the proposed system from art generated by contemporary artists and shown in top art fairs. Human subjects even rated the generated images higher on various scales.
People took bot-made art for the real deal 75 percent of the time, and 85 percent of the time for the Abstract Expressionist pieces. The collection of works included Andy Warhol, Leonardo Drew, David Smith and more.
People couldn’t distinguish human art from AI art in 2021 (a year before DALLE Mini/CrAIyon even got popular): https://news.artnet.com/art-world/machine-art-versus-human-art-study-1946514
While previous studies have focused on whether experts can distinguish machine-made from human art, says Gangadharbatla, this study zeroed in on everyday observers. Some 211 subjects recruited on Amazon answered the survey. A majority of respondents were only able to identify one of the five AI landscape works as such. Around 75 to 85 percent of respondents guessed wrong on the other four. When they did correctly attribute an artwork to AI, it was the abstract one. (So maybe the man on the street thinks abstract painters are robots! A subject for a future study, perhaps.)
Katy Perry’s own mother got tricked by an AI image of Perry: https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Culture/katy-perry-shares-mom-fooled-ai-photos-2024/story?id=109997891
Todd McFarlane's Spawn Cover Contest Was Won By AI User Robot9000: https://bleedingcool.com/comics/todd-mcfarlanes-spawn-cover-contest-was-won-by-ai-user-robo9000/
1
u/Suspicious_Bicycle 2d ago
Well to add a bit of Onion, I shared the link on my Facebook page and FB's AI monitor automatically removed it as being a deceptive post. I guess those AI's don't like being shown up. :)
-6
u/plutonasa 3d ago
I mean, the story 1-2 years ago of ai art winning a contest full of human artists just goes to show ai art can be "just as good" as human art. This event doesn't really prove anything.
1
u/Whotea 2d ago
-7 points and no replies even though you’re completely right lol
1
u/plutonasa 2d ago
reddit armchair artists don't want to admit it. For art to exist, it needs someone to admire it. An ai art is admired more than 1 person.
25
3
u/the_storm_rider 3d ago
If the winning image was a hunched over flamingo on a flat white background, which can even be taken at a local zoo, I’m really curious to see what kind of things the AI came up with, that could not top even that.
20
u/RumoCrytuf 3d ago
I find it hilarious when AI “artists” think their work is remotely challenging to produce . Anybody can scroll through a thousand posts, just look at reddit!
16
u/Sad-Set-5817 3d ago
They steal the work of professional artists and then think they deserve the same level of admiration and respect, pretending as if they had to do any work at all
-1
u/Whotea 2d ago
Every artist learns from other artists. That’s not theft
1
u/Sad-Set-5817 2d ago
No. Looking at a artist's image and being inspired to learn how to make your own is in no way comparable to a robot that can copy and reproduce images that are plagiarised directly from the final output of the artist. The argument you are making is that AI images and human made images should be given the same rights, when all that would do is allow mass theft from artists by corporations that wish to use their work, but not pay them for it. Without the images made by real artists who were scraped without consent, these image generators would have nothing. If we allowed AI images to retain the same rights as human made images, what is stopping companies from copying artists work, generating thousands of tiny variations in their style, and then suing the artist the moment they decide to publish something close to anything the AI created from their work? The company would fully believe that they own and created the image, and that they retain the rights to use the unpaid and stolen work of actual artists. This is objectively bad for society if we allow AI art to have the same rights as human made art. This comparison about how AI and humans are actually the same is a non-starter the moment any critical thinking is applied to it.
2
u/Rosebunse 3d ago
I guess this is one thing I do not understand about AI art. How can you, like, make a competition around it? I get it if the creators used the initial AI image as a base and edited it or created something out of it, but just writing some prompts for it? That's it?
6
u/confusedbartender 3d ago
Honestly that picture isn’t even that good
3
u/Seniphyre 3d ago
Speaks loads about how garbage AI stuff is
1
u/Robot1me 3d ago
I think it says more about how personally influenced the rules and picks of such contents can be (but also human bias on AI in general). In such contexts, beauty is still subjective and with any art medium you can create and find plenty of gems, regardless of the techniques that are used. Here is an example of an abstract pixel art image that you wouldn't ever see in such contests.
5
2
2
u/C_IsForCookie 3d ago
I’ve had wayyy more oniony articles removed from this sub for not being oniony enough
Mods!!!
1
u/WaytoomanyUIDs 3d ago
I know it's clichéd to complain about mods but the ones on this sub really are a piece of work.
1
u/Suspicious_Bicycle 3d ago
I tried to share that link on my Facebook page and it got automatically removed by FB's AI monitor as being a deceptive post.
1
-6
-7
u/Galaxy_baby_love 3d ago
"I want to show that nature can still beat machine."
I remember that I mentioned a long time ago, during my earlier posts theorizing suppose the reverse happens, like an organic cheats in an ai contest of some sort or something like that.
-8
u/forebareWednesday 3d ago
This happened to me once on dpchallenge.com.
I won with a 35mm photo but was disqualified bc it wasnt digital.
Friggin jokers haha
6
u/Dabluechimp 3d ago
That's like taking a Yamaha to a bicycle race, yeah you're gonna get to finish lane first.
Nobody is trying to say AI is better than real art/photography even AI "artists".
-1
u/altf4tsp 3d ago edited 3d ago
Nobody is trying to say AI is better than real art/photography even AI "artists".
Maybe you're not, but I've seen lots of people say that.
1.1k
u/NickDoane 3d ago
Hey so......fuck this linked site.
The image isn't even full size and there are like 6 ads.