Owl photo dethroned from wildlife comp amid backlash: GenAI paranoia is ruining photography contests

I’ve had the pleasure of judging a lot of photo competitions in my time, and I can tell you that the most contentious category to critique by far is wildlife. That’s because it’s fraught with potential rules violations that are often extremely difficult to investigate: captive subjects, baiting, harassment, compositing, and more recently, generative AI.

So you can imagine the furore when the National Wildlife Federation selected a stunning image of a great horned owl, perched in front of an aurora in Oklahoma as the winner of its Garden for Wildlife Photo Contest. It didn’t take long for the comments to whip up a storm. The original Instagram post has since been removed, but PetaPixel reported that these included accusations of both AI involvement and compositing.

Particular attention was directed towards the owl’s talons, which appear to show too many digits – often a hallmark of generated AI imagery. And while the aurora has been explained away as a geomagnetic storm, a well-lit image of a wildlife subject in front of a well-exposed night sky would be extremely challenging to achieve in a single frame.

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This is an important point, because the Garden for Wildlife Photo Contest does not allow composite imagery. And indeed, to the competition's credit, the image has since been disqualified due to it being deemed a composite and an incredible image of a Yellow garden spider by Nicole Land has been announced as the deserved winner. As far as I can see, to date, the competition has offered no conclusion as to whether or not generative AI was involved in the offending image's creation.

Now, I’m generally very sympathetic to competition judges. Frankly, it’s a thankless job and you can’t please everyone. Heck, it’s pretty hard to please yourself, because when you’ve sifted through thousands of images and ended up with tens of potential winners, you rarely feel wholly satisfied with your choices.

And situations like this aren’t entirely on the competition. Images are judged in good faith, that’s why there tends to be a very carefully worded list of rules. But in this instance, I cannot understand why the offending image wasn’t flagged, immediately. To me at least, it screams further investigation.

However, this entire situation has highlighted another ugly side of genAI imagery. And I don’t believe it’s being talked about enough. AI accusations. I don’t know whether or not the image in question was partially or entirely AI generated or not. But it still breached competition rules and in doing so it still caused an AI uproar.

Every time something like this happens, people get a little bit more paranoid about AI, to the point that we now live in a world where photographs, videos and artworks are constantly assessed for even the slightest hallmark of genAI involvement.

Whether or not the content in question is genAI is kind of superfluous to my point. The rot has already set in. The world is more skeptical of photographs and videos than ever before. Heck, you can’t even come across a funny video of a cat – mid doomscroll – without ditching the laughter for a second to really analyze the footage.

Hmm, is that AI? Or is that…

Too late, the moment – the impact – it's gone...

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