The World Photography Organisation recently held its Sony World Photography Awards, and the winning image was The Electrician by Boris Eldagsen. However, when his win was announced, Eldagsen declined the prize.
It turns out that the German artist was trying to prove a point rather than win an award. The Electrician is not, in fact, a work of photography — it is an AI-generated piece of art that he submitted “to find out if the competitions are prepared for AI images to enter.” In his statement declining the award, Eldagsen said, “AI images and photography should not compete with each other in an award like this. They are different entities. AI is not photography. Therefore I will not accept the award.”
The organizers of the competition have yet to comment, though Eldagsen’s image was removed from the show and competition website. The image is part of a series by Eldagsen called PSEUDOMNESIA: Fake Memories, in which he used AI to create images designed in a 1940s photographic style. They are, in his own words, “fake memories of a past, that never existed, that no one photographed. These images were imagined by language and re-edited more between 20 to 40 times through AI image generators.”
