To celebrate its 10th anniversary, German AI company PRC, best known for its Excire photo-management software, hosted a photo contest judged entirely by AI. The winners have been revealed. Did the AI evaluator make the right picks?
NSFW warning: One of the winning photos may not be suitable for all ages.
Excire’s “People in Focus” contest offered photographers the chance to win their share of a $7,000 prize pool, including a $4,000 grand prize. The winner is photographer Michael Schnabl, who took top honors for his portrait, “Flowers.”
Second place went to photographer Mike Timmer for his portrait of one of China’s iconic traditional fishermen, who work alongside cormorants to catch their prey. For his aptly titled “Cormorant Fisherman” photo, Timmer won $2,000.
The final money-winning photographer is Thorsten Junike, who won for their boudoir-inspired portrait, “There Must Be an Angel.”
When Excire announced the contest, the company said that its AI judge had been carefully trained by expert photographers using hundreds of thousands of photos. PRC said that the contest would be a fun way to compete, win money, and start a conversation surrounding the use of AI in photography. The company also said that the AI judge would be “extremely fair.”
“Human judges can be inconsistent and biased. Excire’s AI judge, however, analyzes submissions with unerring consistency,” PRC said.
The company’s CEO, Professor Erhardt Barth, who is also a machine learning expert at the University of Lübeck, admits that artificial intelligence is unfit to replace human taste.
“But it can objectively analyze what makes a photo great. Excire’s AI offers impartial evaluations without subjective bias and has already served as a juror in several prestigious photo contests,” Barth told PetaPixel.
Examining the final top 20 photographs from the AI-judged “People in Focus” photo contest reveals some emerging trends regarding the AI’s preferences for specific types of photos. Of the top 20 photos, many exhibit particularly strong contrast and dramatic lighting. Several of the images also feature stylized color treatments, eschewing neutrality in favor of heavy tinting and white balance adjustments. It’s also hard not to notice that many of the highly scored images feature young, conventionally attractive women, although that’s perhaps not so unusual in portrait-focused photo contests. AI has demonstrated biases concerning preferred representations of people.
The competition also did something very unusual, only possible with a computer judge: submissions were judged immediately upon entry, and a public leaderboard was updated in real-time during the submission period, which ran through the entire month of June. It is easy to wonder if photographers adapted their submissions based on the images that had already been scored highly by the AI judge, which could help explain some of the aesthetic consistencies visible in the final top 20 leaderboard.
PetaPixel‘s Take
I used to enter many photo contests when I was getting started in photography. It was a fun way to measure my skills against my peers and a great excuse to go through my photos and post-process my favorites. Although I had occasional successes, I mostly came up short. That’s the nature of the beast for most of us.
While it’s always easy to blame judges when losing a contest, the fact of the matter is that in any photo competition, especially the big ones, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of photos that you could make a case for as the ultimate winner.
There are many talented photographers, and someone could be incredibly skilled yet never win a contest. I’m not lumping myself into that group; there are many contests I entered that I never had a chance in hell of winning. But my point is that while human judges can err or make mistakes, it is seldom the case that a single judge or a jury of talented photographers picks a “bad” winning image. Excire’s AI judge didn’t, either, for what it’s worth.
However, I don’t see the need for an AI judge in a photo contest. It’s also not something I want, even if it could be “better” in some sense. Real, meaningful art is created by people, and I think it should be judged by them too, even if they don’t always get it right, whatever “right” means in this case.
Besides, the nature of AI, at least for now, is that people must train it, and their subjective preferences seep into the training program and ultimately influence the final AI and how it “evaluates” photos. An AI judge doesn’t really solve the “problem” of human subjectivity — it just moves it behind a curtain.
Excire’s goal with its “People in Focus” contest and AI judge was to open up a conversation about AI in photography. By that measure, the contest was undoubtedly a success. It also gave many photographers a free chance to win their share of $7,000, and that’s great. Congratulations to all the winners for their excellent shots.
Image credits: Excire Photo / Individual photographers are credited in the captions.
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