Key Highlights :
1. An artist has won a prestigious photography prize with an entry that was generated by artificial intelligence.
2. The artist, Boris Eldagsen, initially rejected the gong from the Sony World Photography Awards after concluding that such competitions were not yet equipped to handle AI entries.
3. The awards organisers initially accused the artist of “misleading" behaviour, but removed the accusation from a later statement after a furious reply from Eldagsen.
4. Many photographers and artists fear their livelihoods are under threat from AI tools that allow anyone to create striking images with just a quick text prompt.
5. The rapid rise of AI image generators has already sparked legal cases, as the tools are “trained" on a vast number of images — many of which could be copyright protected.
6. Last year, an AI-generated artwork won a prize at the Colorado State Fair, prompting soul-searching in the art world.
7. Sony World Photography Awards announced Eldagsen’s entry — a sepia-toned image of two women entitled “Pseudomnesia: The Electrician" — as the winner of its creative category in mid-March.
8. Eldagsen gave interviews at the time explaining how he had made the work and saying he wanted to spark a debate over AI.
9. However, he wrote last week that “AI images and photography should not compete with each other in an award like this" and rejected the prize.
10. “I applied as a cheeky monkey, to find out if the competitions are prepared for AI images to enter. They are not," he wrote.
Artificial intelligence has been creeping into the fine arts for a while now, with some artists embracing the technology and others feeling concerned about its implications.
Last year, an AI-generated artwork won a prize at the Colorado State Fair, prompting soul-searching in the art world.
The piece, called “The Unseen”, was created by a team of programmers from the University of Colorado Boulder. The artwork is made up of thousands of images taken from Google Street View, and it was designed to look like a real painting.
Some people were excited by the prospect of AI being used in the arts, while others were worried about the implications of machines creating art.
Some art critics argued that the piece was too artificial and that it didn’t represent the true artistry of human beings.
Others argued that the artwork was a great example of how AI can be used to create new and innovative art.
Regardless of people’s opinions, the use of AI in the arts is definitely on the rise.
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