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Should AI-generated pictures win “Creative” categories of photo contests?

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Sony World Photography Awards recently published the winners and shortlists of its Open competition. The photos are absolutely stunning, but there’s just one problem – the Creative category winner isn’t a photo at all. The winning image resembles a portrait photo from the 1940s, with a characteristic vintage, nostalgic feel. But on a closer look, you can spot the weird hands – one of the biggest weaknesses of text-to-image generators.

This case sparked some serious debate in the photo community. It also made me think about AI and its place in photography. Should AI-generated art enter and win photography contests? Is it fair? Are there legal issues? I wanted to discuss all of this and more in this article.

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Midjourney’s new Describe feature could be useful for photographers

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I don’t know many photographers these days who aren’t comfortable using post-processing software such as Photoshop or Lightroom. Many of these programmes are beginning to introduce AI features, with Adobe launching its own text-to-image generator Firefly this last month.

I can see the allure of using AI to fix skin retouching issues or make masking easier, for example. But how could we utilize text-to-image generators such as Midjourney to our advantage without denigrating ourselves as photographers? In this video, photographer Andrea Pizzini attempts to answer that question by demonstrating the new ‘describe’ feature.

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Midjourney stops free trial due to “trial abuse”

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Text-to-image generator Midjourney has stopped free trial due to “trial abuse,” as its CEO explains. There has been a massive influx of new users lately, which kept crashing the site for paid ones. So, if you’ve been using your free trial – sorry, you’re going to have to pay earlier than you thought if you want to continue using the popular text-to-image tool

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No copyright protection for AI images, says US government

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All images that are created via text-to-image prompts are not protected under US copyright laws, the US Copyright Office (USCO) has stated. That means that anything created via Stable Diffusion, Dall-E or Midjourney cannot be copyrighted, at least in the USA.

The USCO equated the prompt-creator to telling an artist or designer what to make. That is, the idea itself is what is being discussed, and as such, the idea has no value available to be given copyright protection.

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Insta-famous photographer fesses up that his ‘photographs’ are all AI generated

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To look at Jos Avery‘s Instagram account is to be greeted by a sea of beautiful portrait photographs staring right back at you. The sheer number and variety is staggering, and his 27K+ followers seem to agree, often asking for tips and tricks to emulate the photographer they hold in esteem.

Except that there is one issue. Namely that none of these ‘photos’ were taken with a camera. Avery has recently ‘come out’ and admitted that all of them were created using Midjourney, an AI image generator.

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Scientists have created a tool that stops AI stealing your photographs

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Are you worried about AI image generators stealing your artwork and spitting it out as its own? If so, you’re in luck. Scientists from Chicago University are fighting fire with fire, so to speak. They have developed a sort of AI invisibility cloak that will make your images unable to be sampled by the image generators.

The software is called Glaze and “cloaks” the images so that models incorrectly learn the unique features that define an artist’s style. This way, it makes AI plagiarism much less likely.

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Research shows that AI image generators can replicate existing photos

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It might be a good time to study law. Or copyright law, at least. Researchers have released a study that proves that AI image generators can and do, copy existing images that they’ve ‘looked at’ during the machine learning process. This means that there is a chance that anything spat out by the software could be an exact replica of a copyrighted image.

This debunks the favorite argument that AI machines are no different from humans’ learning processes and that everything they sample is merely ‘inspiration’ to create something new. This appears to not be the case, according to the study. Although it is relatively rare at the moment, the researchers predict that with time it could become a greater problem.

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I asked A.I to write a PRD for the perfect mirrorless camera

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As A.I. is getting stronger and more potent, I wanted to see if it is capable of writing a Product Requirement Document (PRD) for the perfect mirrorless camera. Getting a good PRD for a new product is at the heart of camera brands’ work. You can think about it as an effort to decipher the needs of the market and then to bring a product that will meet those needs.

If the PRD is bad, no good camera will come out of it. Of course, a good PRD does not provide a guarantee to a good product, it can still fail on R&D, Manufacturing, Marketing, Supply chain issues and a million other things. But a good PRD is the foundation on which a camera is built. And if the foundation sucks, no amount of R&D, logistics or marketing can turn it into a good camera.

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It’s official: Midjourney used a “hundred million” images without permission to train is AI

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David Holz, the founder of Midjourney, recently admitted something we’ve already assumed: the company’s AI was trained on hundreds of millions of images without consent from their authors. This revelation has sparked outrage among both artists and privacy advocates. It has raised concerns about the ethical implications of such actions, as well as copyright issues that might emerge.

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This photographer used AI to help create these exquisite Joan of Arc images

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been hitting the headlines a lot lately. According to popular opinion, it will likely destroy art, photography, and the creative industries as we know them. But is that the whole story? Perhaps we are missing something here. Surely there is a reverse side to all the doom-mongering?

Well, photographer and digital artist Chris Koeppen may actually have found that silver lining. Chris, who goes under the creative alias of An Ethereal Fire, has been using AI for good instead of, you know, evil. He has been using text prompt AI imaging to enhance his creative output and has recently created this series of extraordinary composite images based upon the legendary Joan of Arc. Chris took the time to chat to DIYP about how he made them and about where he sees the future of photography and AI.

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