Nikon photography contest winner loses title after scientists spot signs of AI
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Why do people fall for it so easily? Is it just laziness? Rush to finish things? We are so much better at creating new things that using the tech feels like cheating to ourselves.
The issue here is you're trying to make something a binary that is a continuum. Humans are tool users and the vast majority of animals depend wholly on their bodies to accomplish everything. It's our greatest strength and weakness.
>We are so much better at creating new things
Are we? If this were really true we'd have had rockets at least 10 thousand years ago if not more. Actual 'new' creations that are not mixes of previous things are incredibly rare and most of those are found by shear luck with interacting with the natural world. We love telling ourselves a particular story about how creative and wonderful and fucking great we are but the vast majority of human behavior, including my own is just an iterative copy of other humans behavior.
Yes it is my personal belief that we are definitely much much better at creating than AI models, which the only thing they do is output an empty and dull regurgitation of its training. There's nothing truly personal and original coming out of it when it comes to creating music, literature, art, etc.
Do you know why I am so against all this hype? Because it is a poison for the mind, it deprives you from thinking from understanding and from questioning things by ourselves, and I'm already witnessing AI junkies that consume and take for granted every single output from a model.
We have already proven that most social networks are toxic and detrimental to people, especially teenagers. On top of that now add no thinking for ourselves anymore.
Why think if you can now outsource it to a computer, right?
I guess those AI models were trained on solutions to Navier-Stokes and a proof of the Quasi-Riemann hypothesis.
> Do you know why I am so against all this hype? Because it is a poison for the mind, it deprives you from thinking from understanding and from questioning things by ourselves, and I'm already witnessing AI junkies that consume and take for granted every single output from a model.
This argument has been made against every human innovation, including writing. Maybe it's true this time but I doubt it.
> Why think if you can now outsource it to a computer, right?
I was already outsourcing plenty to the wikipedia, do-yourself-youtube videos, and so on. This doesn't seem that different.
When I revealed it was AI written everyone immediately ate their words and said they hated it all along and it was obviously derivative.
(throwaway because when I posted this under my main account I started getting death threat emails. like, grow up.)
> I recently had ChatGPT Astra write a bunch of short stories for me in a universe I'm fond of.
Because that way of stating it makes it pretty clear you yourself don't really see yourself as the author of the stories.
Simultaneously, you presented them to your friends as if you were the author. So basically your friends found out you BS'd them. Why wouldn't they be upset? Seems like a totally natural reaction.
Now, if you performed extensive labor to get the story into the shape it it's in, hours long conversations with the model, some manual tweaks, etc etc, maybe you have a better claim to authorship than you would if you used a one shot prompt (though your own framing makes it sound like you did very little)
And when they found out you stole it and claimed it as your own, they weren’t impressed?
Jesus Christ you AI Delusion Syndrome people (I use that term loosely) have brain rot.
This needs to be emphasized.
Basically they realized it was droppings from the theft machine when they'd been told it was original content and they felt betrayed and disgusted -reasonably so, I might add.
Something like the forest and trees applies here.
An LLM can be good at math and shit at art. And in fact, they all are
This just is such repeated drivel, a thought terminating cliche.
Remember over a decade ago when AI trained itself to whip human players at Go using moves no human ever did. Because I do.
We operate within history whether you like it or not. This problematizes any abstraction that is conceived in terms of ahistorical static information and difference.
If I stimulate your neurons with a couple of electrical charges you will experience a "real" phenomenon which isn't real by any classical sense of the definition because the origins of that phenomenon are not "natural".
Of course it is! You post process a picture you took with your camera. As a photographer, can you open paint/photoshop and create a picture out of nothing and submit it to this contest without it being considered cheating?
Wouldn't be surprised if in a few decades that we have to X-ray the participants in hand competitions for robotic enhancements.
I am consistently surprised by the levels of self-righteous hubris in the techbro community. People rationalising horrible behaviour and perpetuating the tragedy of the commons, just with computers.
I'm old enough for nostalgia so i regularly find myself pining for the days when the software industry was smaller and the nerds arena was not taken over by the MBA types and temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
Why don’t we allow scooters in 100m sprints in track and field events?
https://bo.world/blogs/newsroom/insane-100-mph-e-turbo-scoot...
LLMs are truly worse at creative processes and I'm sorry you're not exposed to enough beauty in your life to recognize that
AI is not a shovel. A shovel digs faster than hands, but it is still digging in the ground and cannot unearth anything that wasn't there.
Generative AI tooling creates things that weren't there. It is not deterministic and not compatible with the spirit or rules of creative competition.
People get upset when other people use AI in the arts because the point is largely human expression. Technical virtuosity isn't even necessarily the most important thing in art (just look at modern art and how common the philistine refrain of "my kid could do that" is).
Art doesn't serve a utilitarian function. Using AI for it largely misses the point, and I think that's what people get upset about. It's like showing up to play tag and saying "actually I'm going to play hide and seek instead" you aren't following the established social norms of the game.
Contests, in general, always ways have restrictions around them, because they are meant to test particular human feats. I'm sure plenty of future contests will have rules against AI just as today plenty of contests arbitrarily limit technologies for the good of the competition (e.g. no doping in sports).
To respond to this situation by emphasizing the utilitarian function and value of AI is to completely miss the point.
And at the same time many of these distinctions are artificial human constructs.
The idea of these photography contests is nearly dead, if not dead. Much like the no doping in sports, once the technology gets too good, for example replicating the exact processes of your body the error rate on detection gets so high you might as well flip a coin. When making rules for any system you can always have adversaries. In contests you have two types of cheating you have to deal with. Cheaters that want to win, and cheaters that want to show you your system is broken and can't be fixed. The second type is the kind that shows you that your rules are arbitrary little abstractions in the shadows on the wall of Plato's cave.
But a damned shovel cannot create the dirt it digs.
Jesus Christ you AI Delusion Syndrome people are exhausting.
Drugs allows you to cope with hard things or allows you to escape the toll you have to pay.
Similarly, AI allows brain to do more with less energy expenditure. This is why it looks so tasty and is very addictive.
Your brain doesn't work at that hard, AI allows this, however there's no free lunch on that planet. The effort you give into something returns as quality and finesse, however it's tiring as well.
Addiction is a complex is a hard problem regardless what you are addicted to, it's not a light or easy matter to discuss, though.
It's like anything goes in most human endeavors. Society is winging it; duct-taped solutions abound. Most people lack taste or a keen eye for quality, and only notice when there is something seriously wrong. Even then, politics and all sorts of other concerns skews how people respond to things. This is why we complain about AI slop in the fields we know about, while the public at large think AI is the best thing after sliced bread.
Faced with this, unless someone is really passionate about their work, they eventually kind of tune out, and then look for how to expend the least effort possible to get whatever (uncertain or politicized) reward they can in their endeavors.
Going forward, I’ll be using local diffusion models exclusively, and I couldn’t care less what others think. This workflow suits me perfectly, and I genuinely enjoy the process. I have over 100,000 digital and film photos I've slowly been processing using this method - I have restored photos I tried to restore the older ways without success. I'm so grateful for these local models.
I use the Portable version of ComfyUI, most are done with Qwen Image 2.1 and some hard restores using FIBO2. You can find a bunch of video tutorials on YT for both models.
Edit: an earlier statement from Nikon said that he was complying with the investigation and "At this time, we don't see that any rules were violated" https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ck4gjn1yzprno
As it happens, the final decision is not that the disqualified photographer was intentionally cheating, but that the video was ineligible for the competition.
I've also started using Flux.3 Klein for extra added details. Local diffusion models are so great.
Restore ? Are you sure ? Watch out for people with 3 hands in your "photographs"
Anyway, if you know of VAV VGX then welcome thus the three hands remark.
This is the second time that I had to read about your off-topic personal projects where it’s utterly irrelevant that you use AI or not. Add an off-topic tag to your messages at least.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50038640
This is already present for the last decade. It's the foundation which makes "sports DSLRs" possible. AI here is not what we know as today's "AI". These are specialized models baked into DSPs to run at inhuman speeds. In Sony's case it's phase data, image itself, information from the lens, and sometimes the accelerometers on camera. This is not making something up from thin air.
AI assisted autofocus is smarter phase detect autofocus. Subject tracking is an educated guess for where the focus shall move, based on movements in the image.
My ~20 year old Nikon D70s has a 1004 pixel "scene detection and metering" sensor "trained" on thousands of images to make educated guesses in full-frame metering mode to exposure correctly. This is in no way helping or altering the image in any way. Same for faster autofocus and object tracking.
Exposure, white balance, noise reduction, color correction, HDR et al can be all achieved with deterministic and traditional algorithms as well. Some of these processes have history in film photography and carried over to digital from analog. Some photographers are famous for their darkroom treatment of their shots during development.
Processing an image with deterministic algorithms using the data in the raw photo is fine. This is how darkrooms work as well. However, guessing things, altering images by adding something which was not there and claiming otherwise is not acceptable. This can be a new element inside the scene or pixel details which was not resolvable by the lens/sensor/film to begin with. Both are "photomanipulation", not photography.
Even ~20yo lower tier digital cameras still required understanding what light meter meters and correcting for it.
I probably shot less than 100 frames in full auto mode with that D70s, rest was apeture priority or full manual. The reason I still love my D70s is it behaves like an analog camera very much, from its light meter correction needs to ISO response of the sensor.
When compared to it, shooting with A7-III still feels like cheating sometimes. Maybe I should get the Pentax fixed or start playing with the Canonette 28 I have.
I guess the key point is that use of features needs to be adopted slowly in competition so that it doesn't turn into a materials sport where it's just the most expensive equipment winning.
AI photo editing is surely a competition-worthy art of its own.
Edit: moot point; it's object recognition to find the auto-focus target, not applying digital refocusing.
AI assisted autofocus and object tracking doesn't alter the image after capture. It just moves your focus point and tries to keep the object optically in focus during the half-press phase.
The most expensive equipment doesn't give you any advantage in composing, exposure, etc. If you're shooting birds, you need some tracking capabilities and fast focusing lenses. These are not expensive because they post process the image, but they have expensive glass, fast motors and powerful DSPs to track that bird in that frame. If you can't frame the bird and press the shutter the right moment, you're toast.
Nobody is using relighting tricks like Nikon D-Lighting in competitions, it'll disqualified anyway. I'm not sure my Sony has similar post processing options, even.
These are shot with a D70s: https://www.flickr.com/photos/zerocoder/39910477633/, https://www.flickr.com/photos/zerocoder/41901384135/in/photo..., https://www.flickr.com/photos/zerocoder/53363865806/
This is shot with an iPhone 5, at 4AM: https://www.flickr.com/photos/zerocoder/29340231528/in/photo...
None of them are post-processed with AI tools. Heck, AI is in today was not even a dream when I processed these. Pocket Tiger has been denoised using Profiled Denoise feature of Darktable if I remember correctly. It's taken at Maximum ISO of D70s, which made it a colorful mess, recovering that image in post-processing was a miracle of its own.
> into a materials sport where it's just the most expensive equipment winning.
It's easy to take bad photos with good cameras. Also it's easy to take good photos with bad cameras, as well. It's a squarely skill sport. Equipment can't help you beyond a certain point, and you need to be able to demand that from your camera first.
> AI photo editing is surely a competition-worthy art of its own.
We have photomanipulation competitions for that.
Ah, thanks for the clarification.
Nikon gets to gatekeep their competition however they like. Personally I think it would be a shame to reward photographers for the work they do outside taking the shot and light editing/compositing. What's the point of a competition if you're not going to enforce high standards and challenging constraints?
Taking the photo captures what is visible, editing captures what was seen.
This is why I like Darktable's profiled denoiser. It works by using a noise profile measured with a deterministic process using the camera you're targeting. In short, it's tailored to your sensor by profiling your sensor.
These 2 diffusion models are amazing.
It makes no sense why you’d do something so foolish.
Chicanery seems to scale anywhere that there are insufficient institutional barriers.
Especially since everyone else is aware of that. If you don't take the risk, you will lose to someone who did and got away with it.
This researcher is in China, where I gather the competition is even fiercer than in the West. I do not know that for a fact, but if it is true it makes it even clearer.
Viewed that way it's not foolish. It's actually mandatory. And it's just going to get more prominent as the AI makes fewer mistakes, and competitors get better at spotting and removing them.
Similarly, I expect "raw"-ness to gain on value. Photos untouched by AI or filters. Physical objects. The non-digital. Who knows, maybe physical media will make a comeback.
Either way, it's not good times we're living through, and I don't particularly appreciate all of this happening after *just* becoming an adult in the world.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50038640
That's the reason why there's a "second chance" pool where things can be revived.
Just continue to share interesting links, comment on topics you care about and don't worry about the silly internet points.