Stunning sunset ‘photo’ wins contest after it bowled over the judges – but ‘terrifying’ twist sparks scandal

THE judges of a photo contest unknowingly awarded the grand prize to an incredibly real computer-generated image.

The stunning ‘Sunset Photo’ took first place in a weekly themed competition run by an electronics retailer in Australia.

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The image was submitted by the artificial intelligence art studio – Absolutely. AI

The Sydney-based company works according to the motto: “Who is the better artist, man or machine? Let’s find out.”

And on Wednesday night, the unsuspecting panel of judges awarded the studio’s computer-generated image the grand prize of a $100 coupon.

After winning the competition held by DigiDirect, the company immediately gave up and refused to accept the cash prize.

Created with artificial intelligence, the dazzling image shows a sunrise, a breaking wave and two surfers.

It was registered under the name of Jan van Eycke – the painter of The Adoration of the Mystical Lamb, the most stolen work of art of all time.

The studio warned: “The machine is now the superior artist to man”.

“The surfers in our picture never existed. Neither does this particular beach or stretch of sea,” it said.

“It’s made up of an infinite number of pixels from countless photos that have been uploaded online by anyone and everyone over the years… and what’s left is an absolutely compelling award winner.

“History may look back to our little photography experiment as a turning point when we began to notice the new world we live in.”

The company said it pulled the stunt “to prove we’re at an inflection point with artificially intelligent technology by passing the ultimate test.”

“Could an AI-generated image not only slip through unnoticed, but actually be awarded the grand prize by a photography expert? The answer is unequivocally, yes,” the studio said.

“Recently we’ve seen ChatGPT pass legal, business and medical exams, but no one has discussed the impact AI will have on the creative industries.”

Jamie Sissons from Absolutely. KI admitted the future of creative industries looks “terrifying” – saying its AI creations outperformed real human work.

“As a creator, it’s terrifying. I look back on the work I have created. And to be honest, it all looks so easy,” he said news.com.au.

“I’ve won photography awards. I’ve won awards in filmmaking and things like that. And my stuff doesn’t look as good as what a machine can make.”

Another AI company — Midjourney — also creates startlingly real images from simple prompts like “women at a party.”

It uses machine learning and a neural network to piece together images based on human prompts.

The controversial AI is trained by being given photos, which it then uses to create its own images.

Midjourney has been used to create artwork, comics, and even entire books.

And an artwork by Midjourney also won a competition in 2022.

It’s controversial as artists believe it steals their work as the AI ​​needs to be ‘trained’ with their copyrighted pieces.

AI-generated imagery is an interesting oddity – but there are fears that as the technology evolves, it could one day be weaponized.

A former White House official warned that by 2024, deepfake AI-generated humans will be among us — and nearly impossible to detect.

A picture showing three blonde women with their arms around each other caused a stir on social media.

At first glance, the picture seems quite normal – but they are actually the ultimate catfish.

All of them are 100 percent AI generated and made by software that processes gigabytes and gigabytes of real images before creating their own versions.

Deepfake technology can create eerily accurate versions of real people, but some of the more complicated details always seem to go a little wrong.

The image is believed to have been created by the AI ​​imaging program Stable Diffusion, a Germany-based deep learning text-to-image model.

We previously revealed how China is already using a Matrix-like network of AI-generated humans to dominate the information space online.

Twitter and Facebook profiles are confronted with images of people who simply do not exist – but were constructed by AI software.

Almost indistinguishable from real people, the photos are photorealistic with the imperfections that bring faces to life.