Artist Refuses Top Photography Prize for AI-Generated Image
A German artist whose AI-generated image won first prize at one of the world's top photography competitions has declined the award
Berlin-based "photomedia" artist Boris Eldagsen submitted his image, "The Electrician," to the Creative category of the 2023 World Photography Organization's Sony World Photography Awards open competition.
The picture, which appears to be a dated black-and-white portrait of two women, is part of Eldagsen's "Pseudomnesia: Fake Memories" series(Opens in a new window). Based on the Latin term for fake memory ("such as a spurious recollection of events that never took place, as opposed to a memory that is merely inaccurate," the project page said), the images were "co-produced" using artificial intelligence generators.
The photo—which, if you look long enough, will reveal itself to be just a little bit wrong—was shortlisted in the Creative category, and eventually selected as the overall winner on March 14.
At the time, Eldagsen, who's been a photographer since 1989, wrote in a blog post(Opens in a new window) that he was "very happy" to have won, while also acknowledging that the work "is the result of a complex interplay of prompt engineering, inpainting, and outpainting that draws on my wealth of photographic knowledge.
"For me, working with AI image generators is a co-creation, in which I am the director," he said. "It is not about pressing a button—and done it is. It is about exploring the complexity of this process, starting with refining text prompts, then developing a complex workflow, and mixing various platforms and techniques. The more you create such a workflow and define parameters, the higher your creative part becomes."
A month later, Eldagsen took to the same blog to announce his
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