After unsuccessfully entering various photography competitions, the German artist Boris Eldagsen won his first major prize in March, the Sony World Photography Awards, with Pseudomnesia/La Electricidad, a strange and disturbing image that shows two women in different stages of life. life, the oldest half-hidden behind the young woman, on whose left breast rests the hand of a man who is outside the frame and we cannot see. The portrait, of an enigmatic beauty inspired by the visual aesthetics of the forties, was placed on the podium in the category of creative photography.
So far everything normal. But it turns out that women never existed, there is no man crouching behind them and the real prize that Eldagsen aspired to was not the $ 5,000 with which he is endowed – and which he has voluntarily given up – but to see if he could fool the jury of one one of the most prestigious awards on the planet to bring to the table an urgent debate on images generated by artificial intelligence.
“Artificial intelligence is not photography. I applied to find out if contests are set up to meet AI-made images. They are notâ€, explained Eldagsen, who, before the World Photography Organization made the award public, informed the organization of the nature of the image and offered to disqualify himself so that they could give the victory to a photographer. Or, alternatively, that they use this circumstance for an open discussion about the complex relationship between photography and AI. On his website, the artist regrets that up to now he has only obtained a closed silence for any response.
Rains, it pours. It is not the first time that the AI ​​obtains a prize from a photograph, although the deception had never reached a contest of such projection. Last February, the platform Absolutely AI revealed that the DigiDirect-winning photo of two surfers that was allegedly taken by a drone on a beach at sunrise was indeed beautiful but not at all real. His goals were not too different from Eldagsen’s. “We did it to show that we are at a tipping point with artificially intelligent technology by passing the ultimate test. Could an AI-generated image not only go unnoticed, but be awarded first prize by a photography expert? The answer is emphatically yes”.
The controversy comes at a time when experts from around the world have raised alarm bells about the dangers of a technology that allows virtually anyone, without special skills, to create realistic images that blur the line between what is real and what is. fiction. Proof of this is the multitude of false images that have circulated in recent weeks on social media (Pope Francis wearing a Balenciaga jacket, an earthquake devastating the Pacific Northwest, former President Donald J. Trump being arrested, put on trial, and the imprisoned, or the actor Bill Murray as the new president living in the White House…). In most cases, their authors did not intend to deceive anyone, but to draw attention to the growing power of the tool. Could they one day win the World Press Photo?
