This Post Is Written With AI

That’s angst and industry. I cannot afford the artificial intelligence on my pay.

We are certainly seeing a cage fight in the photo contest field these last few weeks. The entry, success, exposure, and withdrawal of an image in a prestigious associated with an equally prestigious camera maker  – because it was generated with a typed description rather than a lens – is raising hackles throughout the photo press.

It may not be the only instance of this sort of thing happening – and in some others there might have been successes that slipped through. The naughty artists may have glommed the goods and beetled out the back door. We’ll have to watch the photo-news to see if more get caught – since we’ll never know if they get away with it.

I am not too fussed – not entering photo contests myself – but I can see the thing touching me very slightly. Occasionally I am asked to judge at a camera club for one of their monthly competitions. I hope I do it competently and to the satisfaction of the photographers. I know they are very good artists and it is a pleasure to see what they present. But what if one of them loads up an AI generator, writes an order into it, and gets a contest-winner out of it? How am I to know it is a photo or fauxto?

My keen judge’s eyes? My finely-tuned senses? My aristocratic taste?

Hah! I have a baked bean mentality and am getting worse. As far as eyesight goes it is all I can do to run into the back of a bus on a foggy day. My ability to outguess an image is pretty slim. I suspect that the filter that stops AI fraud will have to be applied by the club by demanding a RAW file with EXIF data for each finished image. Even then, I’ll bet there’s a sneak-round possible. I shudder.

Still, the existence of an affordable way to generate AI images would be a boon to one area of photography: the fake-a-loo contest. The photo competition run by a local council, government department, or commercial enterprise designed to harvest cheap advertising images submitted by eager amateurs. These have been going for decades and still turn up despite warnings by the photo press.

If the end-users just download the AI generator they could sit there typing in whatever advertising guff they want and wait until the circuits deliver a usable result. Sort of like a trip to the casino but without having to trek in from the car park – and you wouldn’t have to wander about the council offices with a paper cup full of coins.