Fake “Photography”? Boris Eldagsen and the Sony World Photography Awards 2023
Boris Eldagsen, “The Electrician.” Eldagsen produced the image with the help of AI (Artificial Intelligence) image generators.
It’s an AI Image, not a Photo!
On 14 March 2023, Boris Eldagsen was awarded the 2023 Sony World Photography Award (creative open category) for his work “The Electrician.” But the artist sent shock waves through the photography world when he announced that he would not accept the award: “The Electrician” was not a photograph, but an image created with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The artist announced: “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.”
Artificial Intelligence Art Generators
AI is one of the hottest topics right now. AI technologies teach computers to do things that we thought required human intelligence – such as creating art. Eldagsen created “The Electrician” with AI text-to-image generators. AI text-to-image generators rely on machine learning: the AI generator is first trained on hundreds of millions of images and their description in words. Once it has learned the relationship between the word and the image, it learns how to convert a text prompt given by a user into an image.
The Image “The Electrician”
Eldagsen’s image “The Electrician” is from a series called “Pseudomnesia,” a Latin term for fake memory (get the hint?). It looks like a black-and-white portrait of two women from the 1940s, one older, one younger. You are immediately drawn to the women’s eyes: the younger woman’s expression is watchful, full of expectation and suspicion. The older woman’s gaze is turned inward, as if she was looking back on her life’s disappointments and tragedies. She is standing behind the younger woman, holding her by the shoulders as if hoping to protect her while knowing that she can’t. But if you take a closer look at the older woman’s hands, you realize that something is not quite right. In fact: neither of these two women has ever lived. Eldagsen created the image with a series of language prompts.
AI and the Need for Constructive Debates
AI will have a massive impact on our future. Eldagsen is a photo artist and one of the leading AI experts in Germany’s photography community. The artist was hoping that his refusal to accept the Sony award would lead to a constructive debate about photography and the challenges of AI. Eldagsen wanted to see how prepared competitions were for dealing with the issue of AI generated images. His aim was to spark an honest, open discussion about the challenges connected to AI. What should be considered photography, and what not? It was the first time that an AI image won a major international photography competition, but the organisers of the competition responded to Eldagsen’s rejection of the award with irritation, announcing that they felt no longer able “to engage in a meaningful and constructive dialogue with him.”
The Dangers of AI
There are a lot of fears associated with the rapid developments in AI. Will people lose their jobs? Will students stop learning because they will be tempted to use AI to fulfil their course assignments, making it impossible for teachers to distinguish between original and AI-generated work? Will AI put machines into direct competition with humankind? Will the machines prove stronger than humanity, leading to a sci-fi horror scenario of robots ruling over us? For now, the biggest immediate threat is probably to democracy and photojournalism: AI has made the creation of “deepfakes” possible, images that look so real that it becomes impossible to know whether they are fake or real. How are we supposed to form opinions if we can no longer distinguish between the truth and lies?
AI and Art
In Western art, we traditionally value skills that only a comparatively small group of people can master after years of painstaking training. We appreciate hard work and believe in the unique creative spark of the individual. Will AI put all of this in question by enabling “anyone” to create an amazing image by typing in a few words into a computer programme? Boris Eldagsen doesn’t think so. He doesn’t see AI as a threat to human creativity, but actually finds it quite liberating because it removes certain limits such as material constraints. He also thinks that it puts the older generation at an advantage: an image will only be as good as your prompts, and the quality of your prompts ultimately depends on your knowledge and experience. But AI generated images and photography are two completely different things, and we need to debate the difference. Boris Eldagsen told The Guardian: “I love photography, I love generating images with AI, but I’ve realised, they’re not the same. One is writing with light, one is writing with prompts. They are connected, the visual language was learned from photography, but now AI has a life of its own. If people want to be silent and not talk about that, that’s wrong.”
Eldagsen suggested donating the prize he refused to a photo festival held in Odessa, Ukraine.