Artist and photographer Boris Eldagsen turned down the Sony World Photography Awards, one of the world‘s most prestigious photography awards, promoted by the World Photography Organization, because he submitted a work generated by Artificial Intelligence. For Eldagsen, the competition could not admit a work made with this tool. “I can use it, the idea is mine, but the final work is his,” he told the organizers, inevitably sparking the debate. And they, the organizers instead declared that they did not know to what extent artificial intelligence had intervened and that in any case beyond the creation processes it was the artist who should receive the prize.
Taking part in a long and significant history of rejected prizes – like Sartre who, in 1964, did not want to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature (so that his freedom would not be affected and alienated by what for him was more a ballast than a gratification) – this fact ignites the debate on the relevance of artificial intelligence in the field of creativity, an activity considered specifically “human”, at least until today and before AI surpassed man even in the term fantasy.
The work presented by Boris Eldagsen at the Sony World Photography Awards is entitled «The Electrician» and portrays, in a vintage 1940s style, two women in an enigmatic pose, one crouched on the other, with a third person’s hand leans towards the one in front. It is part of a series called Pseudomnesia: Fake Memories, made by submitting the commands to be processed many times to an artificial intelligence system. In the process, the work was altered using specific techniques such as inpainting, which reconstructs missing or corrupted parts of an image, outpainting, which extends the background of the image, and prompt whispering.
But the point raised by the artist is not this, it is not who has created what, whether the machine is better than man from the point of view of the technical realization of an idea, but that the initial idea coincides with the technique, as if the artificial intelligence had stolen Leonardo’s brushes and had created the Mona Lisa.