No, AI had nothing to do with this strange sight of a flamingo.
It's easy to imagine the text message Miles Astray fed into an image-generating AI tool to get his wild photo of a flamingo looking like a headless ball of pink fuzz on spindly legs. The photo has just won two prizes in the AI category of an international photography competition.
Plot twist: AI had nothing to do with Astray's photo. He shot it with a camera. And that's why it was disqualified from the 1839 Awards after winning third place and people's choice honors for AI photography.
The contest, named as one of the most formative years in the history of photography, includes different categories: animals, architecture, landscapes, people, photojournalism, still life. Photographers from 55 countries participated in this year's 1839 Awards. Astray sent his flamingo photo to the AI group to show that human-generated art hasn't lost its impact in a world of algorithms.
“After seeing recent cases of AI-generated images overshadowing real photos in competitions, it occurred to me that I could twist this story in the same way that only a human could and would, by submitting a real photo to a AI competition,” Astray explains on its website. He saw the shot, titled “Flamingone,” as the perfect candidate for the job “because it's a surreal and almost unimaginable shot, and yet completely natural. It's the first real photo to win an AI award.”
Judges of The New York Times, Getty Images, Maddox Gallery and the Center Pompidou in Paris are among those who chose this year's winners. Right after Astray learned he won on Tuesday, he notified contest organizers that he had actually shot his “AI” image of a bird scratching its belly with a Nikon D750 DSLR camera, using Lightroom to convert from its RAW format to JPG and making a few minimal adjustments.
“I don't process my images much and usually only to correct what the camera didn't capture authentically,” Astray said in an email. “I like to show the world as it is.”
1839 Awards co-founder and director Lily Fierman said the organization fully appreciates the message Astray conveyed by submitting a real photo in the AI category. “We agree that this is an important, relevant and timely statement,” Fierman said in an email. “However, after much internal debate, we decided to disqualify his entry in the AI category in consideration of the other artists who submitted their work.”
Astray calls the decision to disqualify him from the competition “completely justified and correct” and added that he was surprised and encouraged by the organization's support for his message.
The photographer, who currently resides in La Paz, Bolivia, considers himself a creative nomad. He has worked for non-profit organizations in Colombia and Argentina and photographed local communities in Latin America, Asia and Africa. He caught “Flamingone” in Aruba in 2022, rising at 5 a.m. to beat the crowds at a beach known as a spot for free flamingos.
If Miles Astray sounds like too perfect a name for someone who travels the world, it is. In an email, the photographer acknowledged that he uses a pen name (camera name?) and prefers not to publicly reveal his real name.
Astray said he had ethical concerns about misleading the jury and did not take them lightly.
“But I was hoping that these industry professionals and the public as well will find that this time around AI and its ethical implications outweigh the ethical implications of tricking the viewer, which of course is ironic because that's what AI does,” he said. . “I hope that winning both the jury and the audience with this image was not only a victory for me, but for many creatives.”
Below, you can see the (truly) AI-generated image that won the category's top prize this year.
This dreamy image won first prize in the AI category of this year's 1839 Awards.
