Exclusive: Vogue Photographer Admits Some of His Images are AI

AI photos
Emanuele Boffa’s AI-generated images

A photographer featured by Vogue who is accused of passing off artificial intelligence (AI) images as his photography work has admitted that some of his pictures are computer generated.

Emanuele Boffa, whose work has been featured in Photo Vogue, has revealed to PetaPixel that five images on his Instagram feed are generated by AI.

The images, seen below, are not marked as AI to Boffa’s 30,000 Instagram followers, instead, they blend in with the rest of his work which he describes as “real people and real landscapes.”

These images were confirmed by Boffa as being generated from AI
AI image
Some of them have the Vogue logo on them, it’s not clear why
An AI image
AI
AI image

The Italian photographer describes himself both as a “photographer” and a “digital artist” in his Instagram bio.

“I work with all kinds of technology, even AI,” Boffa tells PetaPixel. “But I don’t only use AI to generate my photos, I use Blender, Photoshop, and other systems.

“I’m a photographer, my photos for years have never been pure, but I don’t have to justify myself.”

Boffa’s early Instagram posts would regularly feature a tag for the model posing in the photo. But from November last year, around the time Midjourney V4 came out, a series of fantastical images apparently taken from all over the globe have appeared on his feed with none of the supposed models ever being tagged in the posts.

The following posts from his Instagram account are real photos and not AI, according to Boffa.

“Only five photos were generated by AI and post-produced with Blender, the rest are real people and real landscapes,” says Boffa

When asked why he doesn’t mark the AI-generated images as such, Boffa replied: “James Cameron or Christopher Nolan and many other directors and cinematographers are continuously generating images with the help of computer graphics or AI.

“And I don’t think people care much, artificial intelligence, when used correctly, generates exactly what there is in the mind of the author.”

While Boffa is clearly a talented photographer, as evidenced by his earlier posts to Instagram, his embrace of AI is causing concern because it’s not being labeled as unreal imagery.

Boffa’s comments section is filled with people praising his photography work. But occasionally people will ask if the picture is AI which is always sidestepped.

Some photographers reached out to PetaPixel and accused Boffa of blocking people who question whether his work is AI-generated so he can “continue with the acclaim, attention and likes on the fraudulent photos.”

It comes just a week after another popular Instagram photographer was revealed to have duped his followers into believing his portraiture was real when it was actually AI.

Yesterday, PetaPixel published an editorial regarding this issue.

PetaPixel reached out to Vogue for a comment, the publication did not respond as of publication.


Image credits: All images from Emanuele Boffa/@emanuele_boffa.

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