Imagine you’re sitting in a room with many other talented and famous photographers. You got a lucky ticket to attend the Sony World Photography Awards.
One of its kind, the world’s most prestigious photography event.
You hear the speaker call your name on the stage. The spotlight and all those eyes turn toward you. You’ve just won the most prestigious photography award.
Only to decline it.
When this story happened, and Boris Eldagsen refused his prize; the world was in shock.
Why would he refuse such an important award?
Because his photograph was AI-generated. Instead of capturing his image with light, he did it with prompts.
By entering a photography contest with an AI-generated image, Eldagsen wanted to make a point. He raised questions about the role of human creativity in an AI-driven landscape and the ethical concerns behind this new technology.
He made his point and sparked a discussion, but he still left us in shock. Because how on earth could the jury not detect the machine behind the artwork?
And instead, they honored it with an important title.
It sparks a couple of questions: Is creativity dead, and will AI replace our jobs?
The answer is simple: not really. Because, despite being skilled, AI lacks the creativity, intuition, and moral values that people like Boris Eldagsen have.
I refuse to think that as creatives, we’ve lost the competition against machine-generated prompts. Because we just live in a world that has released another powerful tool.
This is a human collaboration with technology, like when Photoshop and Google were introduced. Both were groundbreaking advances and did things at a pace that no human mind could ever compete with.