Photography, why shouldn’t the artist who makes use of the help of AI be rewarded?
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Black and white photograph, title: “PSEUDOMNSIA | The Electrician”. Author: Boris Eldagsen. Category: “Open – Creative”. Collect the prize? Nobody. The one that aired last week at Sony World Photography was not a joke but a constructive provocation. Which certainly won’t be the last or even the first. The German artist did not show up to collect the prize. Reason? The photograph was not actually taken by him with a camera, but generated with Stable Diffusion, a generative artificial intelligence system capable of creating images starting from a written command. He says he did it to generate discussion. So a joke. The organizers of the award who fell for it with both feet confided to BBC News that Eldagsen would have misled them had Eldagsen misled them about the extent of the artificial intelligence that would be involved. In a statement shared on his website, Eldagsen admitted of being a “cheeky ape,” thanking the judges for “selecting my image and making this a historic moment,” wondering if any of them “knew or suspected it was AI-generated.” The question is not easy to reconstruct. The announcement came on March 14, and a few weeks later Eldagsen announced his intention to decline the award. The organizers first published the winning photo on the site, then said that we knew about the use of AI and then, faced with the artist’s refusal, they withdrew the prize. Beyond the reconstruction of the facts, what happened at the Sony event had already happened.
In August, before the ChatGpt phenomenon turned the tables, a non-artist won an art contest in Colorado. And as was to be expected, all hell broke loose: protests from insiders, jokes from some painters and a few raised eyebrows from art critics.
The author of the work called “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial” which won first prize at the Colorado State Fair is called Jason Allen, he is not an artist but the president of Incarnate Games, a company that creates board games. To win the prize, he used Midjourney, a text-to-images intelligence software competitor to Stable Diffusion. Jason Allen’s was not a joke against the jurors: the signature on the painting read: “Jason Allen via Midjourney”, just to make known the intervention of the AI in the creation of the work. In that case the award was withdrawn but the gesture raised protests and sparked a debate that continues to feed. And it will continue until we make peace with the entry of these tools into our activities. They are not calculators or brushes, we all agree on this but they are something that enhances our creativity. Is writing a prompt easier than using a painting technique? Surely. Is there a risk that Vincent van Gogh’s style could become a filter? It has already happened. I say more, is it possible that the talent or stamp of an emerging artist is engulfed and reproduced by algorithms thus sterilizing his career in the bud? No one can rule it out. Surrender, however, is not without conditions. We have to surrender to the fact that we are facing a new generation of artists. That companies will use these tools to ground some ideas. We have to accept that production times will change. However, the right to receive compensation should be guaranteed to artists if their works have been used to train generative artificial intelligence software. And at the same time the use of AI in a work must be made explicit. We need to know how a work was born, what its DNA is, with what tools it was created. Not to get to separate prizes. But only because the merits must be shared. Creativity is unique. Point.
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