The camera never lies? Creator of AI image rejects prestigious photo award

The winner of a Sony World Photography Award has refused to accept the prize after revealing the winning photo he submitted was created using an artificial intelligence image generator. The Berlin-based German photographer Boris Eldagsen won the Creative category of the award's 2023 Open competition, and was garlanded at a ceremony on 13 April in London. The award is considered one of photography's most prestigious honours. By entering a computer-generated image to a traditional photography prize, and then subsequently refusing to accept the ensuing award, Eldagsen claims he hopes to "drive debate" about a technology that is poised to dramatically alter how we define and understand photorealist imagery. Eldagsen's winning image, Pseudomnesia: The Electrician, was created using DALL-E 2, an image generator developed by OpenAI, the San Francisco-based company that also created the AI chatbot ChatGPT.