Promptography, AI or just a cheeky monkey?
German artist Boris Eldagsen's entry, entitled Pseudomnesia: The Electrician, won the creative open category at last week's Sony World Photography Award.
He said he used the picture to test the competition and to create a discussion about the future of photography.
In a statement shared on his website, Eldagsen admitted he had been a "cheeky monkey", thanking the judges for "selecting my image and making this a historic moment", while questioning if any of them "knew or suspected that it was AI-generated".
Eldagsen went on to say that we should not call his work AI photography but rather use the term promptography as it is done with prompts.
“The creative category of the open competition welcomes various experimental approaches to image making from cyanotypes and rayographs to cutting-edge digital practices. As such, following our correspondence with Boris and the warranties he provided, we felt that his entry fulfilled the criteria for this category, and we were supportive of his participation.
Recent advancements in the use of AI in chatbots, driverless cars, song-writing software and the development of pharmaceuticals have spurred the discussion. Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, said concerns about AI had kept him awake at night, and warned that the technology can be “very harmful” if incorrectly deployed.
Many artists and photographers accuse AI systems of unfairly exploiting the works of hundreds of thousands of human creators on which the systems are trained - some have even launched legal action.
But others simply regard AI as just another tool, a new category of art perhaps, but no less valuable.
Photography itself was once a new and, to some, threatening invention, they point out.
But a host of very basic issues remain unclear, including who owns the copyright for an AI image.
As well as pictures, AI has generated a raft of as yet unanswered ethical and legal questions.
