He announces that he refuses the prize awarded to him by the Sony World Photography Award jury, arguing that the work he submitted was not a real photo but an image made by an artificial intelligence. He thus hopes to launch the debate on the intrusion of AI in the world of art.
Boris Eldagsen, 53, is German, he has been doing art photography, psychedelic and phantasmagoric montages for thirty years, and he has just won a prize at the prestigious Sony World Photography Award in the creativity category. The prize-winning work is a black and white portrait of two women who seem to have come straight out of the 1940s: one is young, her gaze intense, deep, turned towards the distance, and the other, older. , stands behind her, hands resting on her shoulders looking down, again with an intensity particularly well immortalized. The right emotion, captured at the right time. Except that Boris Eldagsen didn’t catch anything at all.
He revealed it himself, this photo is not a photo, it is an image created by an artificial intelligence. These two women do not exist. This scene does not exist. Except that the members of the jury did not notice it. “Actuallyhe explains on his blog, I wanted to do a test, to see if the world of photography was ready to manage the intrusion of AI in international competitions, and obviously this is not the case.” Boris Eldagsen therefore announced that he refused the prize, the jury withdrew his work from its site. But the unease is there.
Dramatic technical progress in six months
In six months, the progress of artificial intelligence specialized in the production of images has been dazzling, exponential. In September, we could say that a photo had been created by an AI because the software did not master certain details, for example, the hands, the phalanges, the nails, badly outlined. Today, this same software has learned, corrected its shortcomings and progressed to the point that no one can tell the difference between the representation of a hand invented by a machine, and a photo taken by a human. Nobody, except a computer.
And this is where it gets dizzying: now only an artificial intelligence can tell if a photo was produced by a human or by a computer. Hence the importance of Boris Eldagsen’s message on the urgency of questioning what is happening, not simply of noting the progress of technology but of asking questions. What do we want to do with these artificial intelligences? What do we want to see? What do we want to show? It concerns institutions, governments, the media, the world of education, clearly much more than the small committee of a photography prize.