And the winner is: ...a computer program

[Anders Wahlund]

This article is to be found in several places in internet now:
https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/news ... ompetition

First, I don’t know on what level this contest was and how competent the jury was. Did they not ask themselves why the waves goes in different directions?! But, this technic is only in its beginning, the programs will probably be smarter and smarter. When will we see a picture made out of artificial intelligence in one of the prestige competitions? (The AI has to make a RAW-file, but that cannot be a huge problem.)

Here we can of course ask ourselves, how important is it to compete in photography really? But that is another question. As long as there is big price money and glory, there will be someone that is trying. It is a drive that is built into all sports.

Also: Artificial intelligence may be able to replace the photographer in many situations. The future will tell when it can be done. It is not possible to be able to make an image out of nothing. There must be a lot of images in internet or databases to use/"exploit".

[Ganesh H Shankar]

Thanks for sharing this thread, Anders.

For the last few years I have been keenly watching what is happening in this area of AI, in particular an area called 'Deep Learning' which is behind most of the AI news that we hear today. I think we are at a stage where many of our conventional wisdom and definitions need a revisit. There was a time when we accepted that art and music can't be learned and "created" by a computer, similar to the way humans learn from a teacher about paintings and music. Such views about music/painting as innately human endeavor is obsolete now, for sure!! The new paradigm shift in programming using what is called 'Deep Learning' can create almost indistinguishable paintings/music, (deep) learning from millions of samples of paintings and music in a few hours. Yes, the ethics and morality of such creations is a different topic. As you noted, interestingly, this silently seems to be changing the landscape of who competes with who to make a living in the world of fine art these days, often leading to many head line news items.

That said, I think there is one characteristic of humans or a life in general which can't be substituted as of now - the life that Nature creates seems to have innate ability to create/behave/learn things from nothing! A newly born snake, hatched out of its egg shell, seems to know how to protect itself without being taught ('learned') by its mother! While most of our 'creations' has its significant roots in learning from a teacher (similar to 'Deep Learning') there is something which we don't understand well that is innate in the creations of Nature. Will we ever know how we think/create (from limited/no data)? I think such endeavors may need to solve problems of bottomless recursion. However, yes, we are at the cusp of changing definitions of art of and creativity as we speak.

A related discussion we had was part of this post below:

[Adithya Biloor]

Ganesh,

Couple of days ago I shared this image with a friend of mine and asked his opinion on this image and a couple of other images in their portfolio. He liked the image and talked about the composition, nice use of light, lines etc. Then I revealed him that this is not a real one, made using AI, photoshop etc. He was a bit surprised. 9 Since he is in IT he was not as surprised as I expected, that's a different thing ) .

AI is not now a highly sophisticated realm used only by highly experts. Casual Instagrammers are using it and it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between real and AI-generated images.

Adithya

[Adithya Biloor]

Hi,

Here is another AI related article.

Adithya