World Photography Organization's Sony World Photography Awards is one of the world's leading photo contest.
Winners have a chance to win $5,000 cash, Sony camera equipment, a trip to London for the awards ceremony, and/or worldwide publicity through a book and exhibition.
And Berlin-based “photomedia artist” Boris Eldagsen made quite a stir and debate at the event, after his AI-made image won first prize at the competition.
Eldagsen decided against accepting the prize, and chose to remain silent to the press.
While Eldagsen indeed won, the audience called his work "images" and not "photographs" because they are "synthetically produced, using ‘the photographic’ as a visual language."
"Participating in open calls, I want to speed up the process of the Award organizers to become aware of this difference and create separate competitions for AI-generated images," the artist said.
Because he made the whole thing an experiment, Eldagsen declined the prize of the expensive Sony camera equipment entitled to him.
It all began when Eldagsen submitted an image titled 'THE ELECTRICIAN' to the Creative category of the 2023 Open competition.
The picture appears to be a photo, a portrait of two women captured with a seemingly photographic process from the early days of photography.
By using the visual language of the 1940s, Eldagsen uses AI to recreate the images as fake memories of the past. Because the image is AI-generated, the image was something never taken, that no one had photographed.
The final image was passed and reedited between 20 to 40 times using AI image generators, in order to combine "inpainting," "outpainting," and "prompt whispering" techniques.
"PSEUDOMNESIA is the Latin term for pseudo memory, a fake memory, such as a spurious recollection of events that never took place, as opposed to a memory that is merely inaccurate," the artist said on the project page. "The following images have been co-produced by the means of AI (artificial intelligence) image generators."
"Just as photography replaced painting in the reproduction of reality, AI will replace photography. Don’t be afraid of the future. It will just be more obvious that our mind always created the world that makes it suffer."
The photo captivated the judges and the audience, that it past in the Creative category, and was then selected to the overall winner of that category.
Winners in the Open Competition were announced on March 14th, and Eldagsen couldn't be happier.
Eldagsen shared the news on his blog in a blog post, saying that:
"I have been photographing since 1989, been a photomedia artist since 2000. After two decades of photography, my artistic focus has shifted to exploring the creative possibilities of AI generators."
"The work SWPA [Sony World Photography Awards] has chosen 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. 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."
Eldagsen traveled to the UK from his home in Germany to visit the exhibition to attend the event, which was held at Somerset House.
"I paid [for the] flight, hotel, and a rented tuxedo," the artist told PetaPixel.
All that to attend the event, and say no to his victory.
"A €800 [~$800] bill to say no to $5,000 [worth of] Sony gear," he said.
When Eldagsen attend the ceremony, he want up to the main stage, uninvited, to speak to the audience concerning his victory.
Hijacking the microphone at the Sony World Photography Awards ceremony, he delivered his statement in person and to refuse the prize.
"They only asked the overall open competition winner on stage. Then they had dinner break. After dinner break before the 2nd part of the show started I went straight to the host. Told her that my image was selected as a winner for the creative category / open competition and if I can say something. As she was taken by surprise I did it anyhow. That’s it. No response. The 2nd part started, the show must go on."
"I stayed until the end. No one from SWPA or CREO approached me, no one was interested in communicating with me."
In an open letter to the contest’s organizers, the artist explained that he created THE ELECTRICIAN and entered the awards in an effort to accelerate the conversation about this subject.
"Thank you for selecting my image and making this a historic moment, as it is the first AI-generated image to win in a prestigious international PHOTOGRAPHY competition," Eldagsen said, in a separate occasion. "How many of you knew or suspected that it was AI generated? Something about this doesn’t feel right, does it?"
"AI images and photography should not compete with each other in an award like this. They are different entities. AI is not photography. Therefore I will not accept the award."
Eldagsen said that this whole incident has shown that the art world has not been prepared for the advancements of AI image generation technologies, which have been hugely accelerated by AIs like OpenAI's DALL·E, DALL·E 2, Stable Diffusion, Google Imagen, Midjourney, and more
"I applied as a cheeky monkey, to find out, if the competitions are prepared for AI images to enter. They are not,” he states. “We, the photo world, need an open discussion. A discussion about what we want to consider photography and what not. Is the umbrella of photography large enough to invite AI images to enter – or would this be a mistake?"
"With my refusal of the award, I hope to speed up this debate."
Following THE ELECTRICIAN's case, all mention of Eldagsen, the photo and his victory, have been deleted from the competition’s website and from the exhibition.
The gallery page for the Creative category no longer lists any entry as the “Winner”.
