AI generated image wins Australian photo comp

[LAwLz]

4 hours ago, Sauron said:

This specific instance may not have hurt anyone but... what if they hadn't said anything?

Then the situation would have been completely different and we shouldn't look at one situation and go "well if they had done this instead then it would have been serious, so let's react as if they did the serious thing".

Reacting to this as if they tried to cheat in a competition and going "but what if they did try and cheat!?" is like freaking out over two kids shooting each other with nerf guns because "what if they had real guns!?".

 

It would be a completely different situation so let's not act like they are the same.

 

 

4 hours ago, Sauron said:

What if everyone started doing this? If sports relied on cheaters admitting to cheating every time I don't think they would really work as a concept.

We already have this issue. This is not something new. People have been cheating in competitions for ages and nobody is saying "we shouldn't try and prevent cheating". I don't see why people are mad at the person who made the AI art piece though. If anything we should thank him because he showed that it was possible to cheat and then admitted to cheating right away, thus highlighting the need to check for this.

 

I think there is a lot of misguided anger going around right now, and this thread is a good example of that. People hear the word "AI" and instantly goes ape-shit. Throws all logic and reason out the window and act purely on emotions, primarily fear and anger.

 

4 hours ago, Sauron said:

It may be a good idea to find ways to detect this type of cheating.

I don't think anyone has said anything contrary to that. If anything, this person was honest and made us aware that we might need to start looking for this type of thing.

Or maybe it will be the competitions that have to adapt, like they did when new camera technology came into the scene. If someone from the year 2023 traveled back in time to the 1980's and entered a photography competition with a modern camera, strapped to a drone and then had the image edited in Photoshop and Lightroom I am sure people would call that cheating too, and that it wasn't "real photography".

[Sauron]

3 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Then the situation would have been completely different and we shouldn't look at one situation and go "well if they had done this instead then it would have been serious, so let's react as if they did the serious thing".

Reacting to this as if they tried to cheat in a competition and going "but what if they did try and cheat!?" is like freaking out over two kids shooting each other with nerf guns because "what if they had real guns!?".

 

It would be a completely different situation so let's not act like they are the same.

That's not my point at all - my point is that this shows someone with malicious intent could do this and get away with it, so it would be a good idea to try and prevent it.

6 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

I don't see why people are mad at the person who made the AI art piece though. If anything we should thank him because he showed that it was possible to cheat and then admitted to cheating right away, thus highlighting the need to check for this.

I take issue with the method and the fact that their main intent was to use this as advertisement for their own firm. If you want to compare this to white hatting there's one key difference - nobody involved in the competition asked for or consented to this experiment. We wouldn't accept someone cheating at the olympics and, on the podium, admitting to it and saying something like "well you should thank me for showing it could be done". Plus, even if this competition was done in a way that allows the positions to easily shift up all the way from the bottom (which is unlikely) people's enjoyment of this competition was likely heavily affected by this annoyance.

13 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

I think there is a lot of misguided anger going around right now, and this thread is a good example of that. People hear the word "AI" and instantly goes ape-shit. Throws all logic and reason out the window and act purely on emotions, primarily fear and anger.

I don't believe that's been the case for me. The issue I take isn't with the concept for AI image generators, it's with the publicity stunt.

16 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Or maybe it will be the competitions that have to adapt, like they did when new camera technology came into the scene. If someone from the year 2023 traveled back in time to the 1980's and entered a photography competition with a modern camera, strapped to a drone and then had the image edited in Photoshop and Lightroom I am sure people would call that cheating too, and that it wasn't "real photography".

Image editing was a thing in the '80s as well, I'd still say there's a substantial difference between going out and taking a picture (regardless of how heavily you edit it afterwards) vs lining up prompts to have an AI generate it. I'm not saying the latter has no value, just that there's a clear difference and that difference would matter a lot to those who enjoy photography as a hobby. You can't participate in a painting competition with a photograph, even though photography has its merits, or in a bicycle race with a motorcycle, even though there's nothing inherently wrong with motorcycles; same with this.

[LAwLz]

22 minutes ago, Sauron said:

That's not my point at all - my point is that this shows someone with malicious intent could do this and get away with it, so it would be a good idea to try and prevent it.

But that's what I said, and I have not seen anyone disagree with that.

I don't get why you keep responding if all you're going to do is just counter arguments nobody is making, while quoting someone who agrees with you.

Someone with malicious intent could get away with it. I think it's a good thing someone without malicious intent highlighted this issue for us so we can start working on countering it. However, people are really shooting the messenger here. People are really mad at this person who won the competition and my guess is that they are mad because they dislike anything that has to do with AI.

 

 

24 minutes ago, Sauron said:

I take issue with the method

What issue with the method do you have exactly?

How do you propose someone would prove that AI art can be passed off as real art without deceiving anyone? I think deceiving and then instantly come clean is the best way of doing it. Otherwise we'll just have people like I've seen on this forum who swear they can tell which image is from an AI and which is not, but then want to know before making any guess which is which, or they wait for the answer to be revealed and then goes "yeah I knew that all along".

 

 

26 minutes ago, Sauron said:

and the fact that their main intent was to use this as advertisement for their own firm.

I don't see how this is an issue, unless you have an issue with AI in general of course. Companies make publicity stunts all the time and they are not inherently bad. Companies highlight winning competitions and enter competitions all the time for marketing purposes but that's not inherently bad either.

Why is a company entering a competition with the main intention to generate buzz bad?

Hell, the entire competition was arranged by a company trying to generate buzz for their store. If you have a problem with a company trying to generate buzz through a competition, maybe you should be against the entire competition.

 

And even if you think a company doing marketing for their product is somehow evil, why does it matter if we can benefit from it? In this case, we can benefit because we get a good idea of how far AI art has come and that we might need to take precautions if we want to keep competitions restricted to certain types of pictures, because people might use it to cheat.

 

 

29 minutes ago, Sauron said:

If you want to compare this to white hatting there's one key difference - nobody involved in the competition asked for or consented to this experiment.

You're making it sound like they were testing some experimental drug or something. It was a competition where the price was 100 dollars. Nobody was in any way shape or form harmed. This had 0 probability of causing any harm to anyone.

And we do tests on people without consent all the time, even white hats do. The entire point of testing if someone would fall for something is to do it without preparing the subject for the test. Sending out a fake scam email to see if someone clicks would be very inefficient if a consent form was sent out first. Right? 

Your comparison doesn't make sense.

 

 

32 minutes ago, Sauron said:

We wouldn't accept someone cheating at the olympics and, on the podium, admitting to it and saying something like "well you should thank me for showing it could be done".

Again, you keep changing extremely important details and then presenting like it's the same situation. This wasn't the Olympics of photography. It was a small competition where the price money was 100 dollars. 

 

 

38 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Plus, even if this competition was done in a way that allows the positions to easily shift up all the way from the bottom (which is unlikely) people's enjoyment of this competition was likely heavily affected by this annoyance.

How did this affect peoples' enjoyment of the competition?

 

 

40 minutes ago, Sauron said:

The issue I take isn't with the concept for AI image generators, it's with the publicity stunt.

Why?

What makes a publicity stunt inherent bad and something we should react with vitriol and hatred towards? 

 

42 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Image editing was a thing in the '80s as well,

There is clearly a very big difference between using a drone to take a picture with a modern digital camera and then editing it in Photoshop and Lightroom, vs taking a picture with an analog camera by hand and then do very primitive touch ups of the image. Don't pretend like it's the same thing, please. It makes it very hard to have a serious conversation with you if you pretend like they are the same and that someone in the 80's would have no objection and think it's a fair playing field.

 

 

44 minutes ago, Sauron said:

I'd still say there's a substantial difference between going out and taking a picture (regardless of how heavily you edit it afterwards) vs lining up prompts to have an AI generate it.

I agree. But I would also say that there is a substantial difference between taking a picture with an analog camera and not doing any editing to it, vs taking a picture with a drone and then do very heavy editing on it with advanced software, maybe even stitching multiple images together.

 

Competitions will have to draw a line in the sand somewhere, and I don't think there is a right or wrong answer to where that line is drawn. 

It will be up to each individual competition to decide what they accept or don't accept. Just like I am sure some drawing competitions doesn't allow images drawn in Adobe Illustrator to be submitted, or how some photography contests might not allow the images to be edited on a computer afterwards they are taken.

 

50 minutes ago, Sauron said:

You can't participate in a painting competition with a photograph, even though photography has its merits, or in a bicycle race with a motorcycle, even though there's nothing inherently wrong with motorcycles; same with this.

Completely agree. But I don't think anyone have said anything to the contrary.

[BuckGup]

They couldn't check the meta data for the photo??

[ouroesa]

I always thought that art would be the last thing AI takes over. Very surprised seeing that it seems to be some of the first things that it is getting rather good at. I know this is nothing new, but didnt see this one coming. 

[LAwLz]

8 hours ago, BuckGup said:

They couldn't check the meta data for the photo??

It's already been mentioned in this thread but metadata can be changed. It should not be used to prove or disprove something. Besides, the competition seems to allow modified images, so even if the metadata said "made in Photoshop" they would probably still allow it.

Chances are this image wasn't just spat out perfect out of the AI program either, so the last step for "regular" photos and this AI generated image would probably be the same, and thus they would have very similar if not identical metadata.

[Sauron]

9 hours ago, LAwLz said:

I don't see how this is an issue, unless you have an issue with AI in general of course. Companies make publicity stunts all the time and they are not inherently bad.

They are when they disrupt a competition and ruin people's fun.

9 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Again, you keep changing extremely important details and then presenting like it's the same situation. This wasn't the Olympics of photography. It was a small competition where the price money was 100 dollars. 

The prize money is irrelevant and if anything a small prize means people are mainly participating for fun.

9 hours ago, LAwLz said:

How did this affect peoples' enjoyment of the competition?

You don't think someone cheating to the first place for a stunt and causing massive controversy around a small amateur competition could make regular participants have less fun?

9 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Why?

What makes a publicity stunt inherent bad and something we should react with vitriol and hatred towards? 

I already outlined the reasons THIS publicity stunt was a dick move. When did I say any and all publicity stunts are inherently bad?

9 hours ago, LAwLz said:

There is clearly a very big difference between using a drone to take a picture with a modern digital camera and then editing it in Photoshop and Lightroom, vs taking a picture with an analog camera by hand and then do very primitive touch ups of the image. Don't pretend like it's the same thing, please. It makes it very hard to have a serious conversation with you if you pretend like they are the same and that someone in the 80's would have no objection and think it's a fair playing field.

Obviously using tools others don't have access too is also unfair but for different reasons. And your argument was that it wouldn't be considered "real photography" which has nothing to do with the playing field being fair. I'm sure some people would say that but I'd disagree and since digital editing has been accepted in competitions not long after it was made commonly available I don't think that's comparable at all. You're the one pretending completely different things are the same here.

9 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Competitions will have to draw a line in the sand somewhere, and I don't think there is a right or wrong answer to where that line is drawn.

This competition did have a clearly drawn line; in the rules it likely says you need to submit a photograph, or maybe it's just implicit in it being a photography competition. Whatever you may think of AI generated images, they can't be classified as photographs and you seem to agree with this. So why are you so adamant that actually deliberately cheating for clout is ok? I get the impression that you're reflexively defending this just because it's tangentially related to the AI art dispute...

[LAwLz]

19 minutes ago, Sauron said:

They are when they disrupt a competition and ruin people's fun.

How did it ruin peoples' fun?

 

 

 

20 minutes ago, Sauron said:

The prize money is irrelevant and if anything a small prize means people are mainly participating for fun.

It's very relevant.

Doing an experiment at a small competition where 100 dollars is at stake is a very different thing compared to a massive competition with millions of viewers from all around the world, and millions of dollars at stake (directly or indirectly).

 

 

28 minutes ago, Sauron said:

You don't think someone cheating to the first place for a stunt and causing massive controversy around a small amateur competition could make regular participants have less fun?

No I don't. Care to explain it to me?

I think you're making some assumptions about how the competition worked.

Also, if the argument is that people just participate for fun, why does it matter who wins? It feels like you're speaking out of both sides of your mouth here.

 

 

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

I already outlined the reasons THIS publicity stunt was a dick move. When did I say any and all publicity stunts are inherently bad?

You said that you were against this because "their main intent was to use this as advertisement for their own firm". 

I asked you why you think this was bad and your response was that it was bad because they did it for marketing purposes. Ergo, things done for marketing purposes are inherently bad in your eyes. At least that's the argument you have presented so far. If that's not your stance then I'd like for you to further clarify what your objections are here. 

If someone asks you "why do you not like this ice cream" and they respond with "I don't like it because it tastes like strawberries", the implication is that you dislike strawberries.

Likewise, if someone asks why you are mad about some event and you respond with "because it was a publicity stunt" then the implication is that you dislike publicity stunts. 

 

 

 

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

Obviously using tools others don't have access too is also unfair but for different reasons. And your argument was that it wouldn't be considered "real photography" which has nothing to do with the playing field being fair. I'm sure some people would say that but I'd disagree and since digital editing has been accepted in competitions not long after it was made commonly available I don't think that's comparable at all. You're the one pretending completely different things are the same here.

I am not following your logic here.

Are you saying that not everyone have access to AI tools and therefore it is unfair? Because I would argue that this competition allows submissions from people with very different tools available to them. They accept drone shots but not everyone has a drone. Does that make the competition inherently bad and unfair? In a photography competition, which is something highly dependent on equipment, there will always be people with unfair advantages. I think AI art tools are far more accessible than for example a drone or really high end camera equipment.

 

I also think you are making a lot of assumptions here.

1) I think a lot of people in a photography contest in the 1980's would object to someone with modern equipment coming in and dominating. I don't think just a few would object to it, because they would not be used to that level of computation being done on photographs. They have different expectations, and those expectations have been changed over time.

 

2) I am not the one saying two separate things are the same. I explicitly made this comparison to highlight how the rules have changed over time as technology have progressed. You're the one who responded to me saying I don't think a competition in the 1980's would object to heavy use of Illustrator/Photoshop, drones, and super high end digital cameras, by saying "well people did some editing to photos in the 1980's as well so...". Those are two very different things.

I think you missed the entire point of my analogy. My entire point is that the rules have changed as technology progressed. Competitions have to adapt and it's up to each competition to decide where they draw the line.

 

3) There were people in this competition that already object to the rules, even before they knew AI art generation tools were involved, because the current rules of using heavy post-processing is not what they want to see in a photography competition. Everyone will have a different opinion about what should and shouldn't be allowed. That was my point, and you responded to that by saying that editing has been done since the 80's with the implication that you are therefore okay with people stitching together multiple pictures taken by a drone and then heavily edited in Photoshop.

 

 

 

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

This competition did have a clearly drawn line; in the rules it likely says you need to submit a photograph, or maybe it's just implicit in it being a photography competition.

You know, you could just look up the rules if you are unsure. It's usually a good idea to research a story before having strong opinions about it.

But yes, the pictures need to be taken with a camera to be eligible to win. It's not explicitly written in the rules but they are implied and I believe the spirit of the rules as well.

 

 

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

Whatever you may think of AI generated images, they can't be classified as photographs and you seem to agree with this.

I agree.

 

 

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

So why are you so adamant that actually deliberately cheating for clout is ok?

Where did I say I was okay with it?

My objection is to the people who are furious about this and making very hate-fueled comments about it. I think the reactions to this story are very weird, misguided and not at all fitting for the story. It's like people read the word "AI" and instantly went super mad and full of hatred, and aimed it at the first person they saw without actually thinking the situation through.

I think this was an interesting experiment and I see no harm in it. I think we should learn from this as well and that it raises some interesting questions regarding how much or how little help from computers should be allowed in competitions. I also think it is an interesting experiment because I think it pokes holes at some things people have said about AI art before, like how they can tell it apart from real pictures, or how it will never be seen as real art and so on.

I think a lot of people are sticking their heads in the sand and I don't think that's a strategy that will work for very long.

[wseaton]

Was playing around with Dalle-2 the other night, and producing some pretty amazing stuff. When you start combining prompts with famous painters or illustrators for a style  results can be pretty cool.

 

However, from what I've seen these programs just pile through massive databases of public domain images and mush them together. A couple times I caught Dalle pulling stock photo images if I wasn't descriptive enough.

 

Back when I did commercial photography and things started to go digital the purists were throwing fits over photoshop complaining that any adjustment made to a photograph weren't allowed. Even basic color / tone / contrast.

 

I quickly informed them that Ansel Adam's, often worshipped on a crucifix by the fine art crowd made a living manipulating the hell out of his prints to the point landscapes looked nothing like reality. But....that was ok with them. Hypocrisy is hypocrisy in my book.

 

Still, the line has always been drawn with photography regarding tone or balance adjustments vs manipulation. Manipulation is when content foreign to the native image is introduced.

 

Fine art photography has been dead for decades anyhow. This just puts another nail in the coffin. 

 

 

 

 

[LAwLz]

3 hours ago, wseaton said:

However, from what I've seen these programs just pile through massive databases of public domain images and mush them together. A couple times I caught Dalle pulling stock photo images if I wasn't descriptive enough.

I am not sure how much you know about the inner workings of AI art generators like DALL-E but you used a few words I see people use a lot when talking about AI art generators and I just want to avoid confusion.

 

The most common AI art generation programs like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, etc, do not "mush pictures together", nor do they "pull images".

The models which is the result of the training contains zero image data. This is pretty obvious when you look at the input vs the output of the programs.

 

The dataset Stable Diffusion 2 was trained on was well over 100 TB in size, and the resulting model is ~5GB in size.

It contains no actual images. It does not mush images together. It does not pull information from images saved in a database. If it did then the models would have to be massive in size.

[BuckGup]

On 2/13/2023 at 1:51 AM, LAwLz said:

It's already been mentioned in this thread but metadata can be changed. It should not be used to prove or disprove something. Besides, the competition seems to allow modified images, so even if the metadata said "made in Photoshop" they would probably still allow it.

Chances are this image wasn't just spat out perfect out of the AI program either, so the last step for "regular" photos and this AI generated image would probably be the same, and thus they would have very similar if not identical metadata.

You could verify the GPS cords from the metadata of the raw image. If the photographer doesn't have the original image it's highly suspect anyways 

[Kisai]

On 2/13/2023 at 10:49 AM, wseaton said:

Was playing around with Dalle-2 the other night, and producing some pretty amazing stuff. When you start combining prompts with famous painters or illustrators for a style  results can be pretty cool.

 

However, from what I've seen these programs just pile through massive databases of public domain images and mush them together. A couple times I caught Dalle pulling stock photo images if I wasn't descriptive enough.

 

The problem is that this a over-generalization of what it does. 

 

The training phase basically looks for noise that "looks something like" the training image, and thus you can pull back out that "something like" image given enough  tries (which could be billions, if you don't know the keywords.) How the "images are stored" inside the model is something akin to JPEG with the compression set to 1.

 

Observe:

 

This is "100", it's 173KB

This is 80, a more typical compression rate you'd find on the web and is 40KB

 

This is set to JPEG compression 1, which is 2KB, and is also no more than 512pixels in either dimension, which is what DALLE2/Stable Diffusion would use as a training size. The "latent image" so to speak is a lot closer to that compression setting 1 than it is 100. Now this is just to demonstrate what the AI might actually have in it's memory, the actual representation is anyone's guess.

 

On 2/13/2023 at 2:10 PM, LAwLz said:

 

 

The dataset Stable Diffusion 2 was trained on was well over 100 TB in size, and the resulting model is ~5GB in size.

It contains no actual images. It does not mush images together. It does not pull information from images saved in a database. If it did then the models would have to be massive in size.

No, it's just weights. So asking for a "Linus Sebastian" would pull out data associated with "Linus" and "Sebastian" and the result would look more like an average of a couple dozen images rather than pulling out a single image.

 

Trying to get Stable Diffusion to pull out the right "Linus Sebastian" is difficult, and often generates people who aren't even remotely close. Which is just an example of how difficult it really is to get AI to produce correct output.

 

This of course is because the model is storing weights associated with keywords, and not actually storing "an image"

 

An AI no more understands "Linus Sebastian" than it does "dog"

[WildDagwood]

On 2/9/2023 at 11:36 PM, Brooksie359 said:

Honestly I don't think AI will replace creative jobs and Honestly I would imagine they could be used as tools for artists as starting points in some cases. I mean think about if you want to make art about a concept and enter it into an AI and then take what it spits out and start modifying it to your liking. It would make process of making art much faster which could be very useful for artists that often get paid per thing they create for someone. 

One problem I see is it can lead to an over-saturation of sub-par work. Kinda like how a lot of games seem to be utilizing UE, you can get one-offs or tech demos that look amazing, but then you have an excess of mediocrity that isn't using the "tool" to it's fullest, resulting in completely different projects having the same lifeless look and feel.

 

My issue with claiming credit for things generated by AI is there's no emotion involved in the works creation, which is basically the root of where art comes from. You can take influence (closer to stealing here, in my eyes) from other artists, and even add to it based on parameters given, but if you have nothing to offer to a piece of art that's unique and derived from your own personal experience/emotions, you have nothing to claim credit over. You only took other peoples work to train the thing, set parameters for what you want, and shit out something new.

[Brooksie359]

2 hours ago, WildDagwood said:

One problem I see is it can lead to an over-saturation of sub-par work. Kinda like how a lot of games seem to be utilizing UE, you can get one-offs or tech demos that look amazing, but then you have an excess of mediocrity that isn't using the "tool" to it's fullest, resulting in completely different projects having the same lifeless look and feel.

 

My issue with claiming credit for things generated by AI is there's no emotion involved in the works creation, which is basically the root of where art comes from. You can take influence (closer to stealing here, in my eyes) from other artists, and even add to it based on parameters given, but if you have nothing to offer to a piece of art that's unique and derived from your own personal experience/emotions, you have nothing to claim credit over. You only took other peoples work to train the thing, set parameters for what you want, and shit out something new.

Art is in the eye of the beholder so I would say that emotion can be interpreted based on the art. I mean it's similar to how pictures of things can easily evoke emotion even though it's not really created with the intention to convey a feeling like someone making a painting would. Anyways I think art is complicated and to thinking that something from AI couldn't evoke emotion is coping.

[WildDagwood]

36 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

Art is in the eye of the beholder so I would say that emotion can be interpreted based on the art. I mean it's similar to how pictures of things can easily evoke emotion even though it's not really created with the intention to convey a feeling like someone making a painting would. Anyways I think art is complicated and to thinking that something from AI couldn't evoke emotion is coping.

Not talking about interpretation of things, I'm talking about where it comes from and claiming credit.

 

Art in it's most basic form, is a method of expression. What are you expressing? Your "unique", internal thoughts and emotions as they manifest in your imagination. If everything your providing is just the product of others peoples deconstructed work, filtered down to your parameters, you can't really claim any credit, imo. Won't even go into the matter of the time, effort, and skill it requires to actually hone those skills that are being used for training these AI, since that's another matter, and a big F U to some of these artists.

 

Nature can evoke emotion, but doesn't mean it's art. A picture (photograph) wouldn't fall under the art category either, imo. Though, I'm sure there's some who would argue otherwise.

[Kamina]

AI will change politics. All the gaslighting...