Audubon Photography Awards Creates AI Versions of the Winning Images
The Audubon Photography Awards has recreated its winning photos with artificial intelligence (AI) to see how the synthetic images match up to the real work of photographers.
The National Audubon Society approached the photographers that won the 2023 Audubon Photography Awards and asked them to describe their photos in a few sentences to “someone who can’t see the image.”
Then, with their permission, Audubon fed those descriptions into the AI image generator DALL-E and compared the generated images alongside the real photos.
Comparing Real Photos to AI Photos
In an article for Audubon, Photoshelter chairman and co-founder Allen Murabayashi warns that AI technology poses “fundamental questions” to wildlife photography.
“Soon we may not be able to tell if a bird photo is real or fake,” he writes.
“It’s not just photographers, but also conservationists who must contend with these developments. Photography has long been used to build wonderment of the natural world and to bolster arguments for protecting declining species, addressing habitat decline, and boosting public trust in the reality of climate change.”
However, Murabayashi insists AI will not replace photography as the technology will not “end our drive to document everyday wildlife moments.”
“For all the transformation AI may bring, I find it unlikely that it will turn human effort, expertise, and experience into quaint anachronisms,” he says.
“The joy of observing a bird and the effort to trek into the backcountry to capture an exquisite photo remind us of nature’s beauty and necessity. It’s up to humans, not AI, to act accordingly to preserve our world.”
This is not the first time a photo competition has tested to see whether AI can replicate the work of its winners. Last year, the Royal Meteorological Society challenged viewers to take the Turing test to see if they could tell which work was from the winners and which was AI-generated.
