Berlin-based “photomedia artist” Boris Eldagsen has attended the World Photography Organization’s Sony World Photography Awards. Eldagsen entered the competition under the category of “Creative” with her photo titled ‘The Electrician’. Part of the series ‘Pseudomnesia: Fake Memories’, which describes the visual language of the 1940s, this photo looks like a very old photograph of two women.Award given to artificial intelligence
‘The Electrician’ was originally created by an artificial intelligence. In fact, not only this photo, but the entire series Eldagsen participated in was re-edited 20 to 40 times through artificial intelligence image generators. Eldagsen says that the reason for doing such a thing is to raise awareness and that separate competitions should be held for images created by artificial intelligence.
Although Eldagsen won the award, he announced that he refused both the award and the Sony camera equipment given to the winner. “As the world of photography, we need an open discussion. A debate about what we should or should not accept as photography,” Eldagsen said in a statement. she said. According to Eldagsen, artificial intelligence and real photographers should not compete with each other in such competitions. The artist, who sees the two as completely different, states that the images produced by artificial intelligence are not photography.this is not the first
On the other hand, this isn’t the first time the AI-generated image has won a photography competition; The Midjourney creation won a photography contest held by Australian photo retailer digiDirect earlier this year. Another Midjourney image won an award in a category at the Colorado State Fair’s annual art competition in 2022.However, an artificial intelligence version of Johannes Vermeer’s legendary painting “Girl with a Pearl Earring” was added to the Mauritshuis collection in The Hague. Mauritshuis is a very prestigious collection and the placing of the work “My Girl with a Pearl”, produced by artificial intelligence, was described as an “insult” by some parts of the art community. We can easily say that the tension between artificial intelligence and the art community will increase in the future.
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