Photographers Outraged After Heavily AI-Edited Image Wins State Fair Photo Competition

An image that was heavily edited with AI has controversially won a state fair photography competition, prompting organizers to change the rules for next year.

Photographer Guy Alston won the Open Class Home Arts “Neon Lights” photography category at the Maryland State Fair in Lutherville, Maryland, with his image.

However, according to a report by the Baltimore Sun, the winning image soon sparked a fierce debate because it appeared to be AI-edited. A Reddit post in the r/maryland community drew more than 3,400 upvotes and hundreds of comments from people who were angry that an AI-edited image had received first place instead of a photograph created without AI modifications.

AI image wins first prize in State Fair Photo Contest
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Following the online backlash, the Maryland State Fair’s photography competition decided to prohibit AI modifications in future entries. Sam Chamelin, superintendent of the Maryland State Fair’s photography competition, tells the Baltimore Sun that the “Neon Lights” category permitted embellished photographs this year and did not prohibit AI-edited entries. However, modifications made with AI will be grounds for disqualification next year following the uproar about Alston’s winning image.

“We want to lean into a kind of digital artistry, be creative with it, emphasize different parts of the photographs — we still want that very much to occur; those are fun photographs,” Chamelin tells the newspaper. “We want to make sure that it’s humans and not machines that do it.”

With 850 photographs submitted this year, Chamelin says it is difficult for volunteers to determine how every entry was made. He claims that he did not know that AI had been used to modify Alston’s photograph when it was submitted into the competition.

‘I Don’t Do an Image From Nothing’

Photographer Alston tells the Baltimore Sun that he used the Google-based AI software Nano Banana in Photoshop, along with other software, to modify an original photograph he had taken years earlier. Alston, who is based in Randallstown, says the category allowed embellishment and that he did not think he was breaking the rules.

“I don’t do an image from nothing, which is what I think a lot of people were saying,” Alston says.

“If you think that photo is the only photo that was in the whole contest that had some AI in it, then you haven’t been paying attention over the past five years.

“Even if you use a little Photoshop or Lightroom, you’re benefiting from improved tools because they’re using AI engines.”

The fair’s photo contest has 40 standard categories and two special categories that change each year, including this year’s “Neon Lights.” While the other classes only allow photographers to use a moderate amount of Photoshop, the competition’s superintendant Chamelin says special categories such as “Neon Lights” have allowed more digital embellishment for at least 10 years.

The rapid rise of AI-generated and AI-assisted tools has created challenges for photography competitions as organizers determine where to draw the line between traditional editing and AI. A similar controversy occurred when a man won a fine art competition at a state fair in Colorado with an image he created using an AI text-to-image generator, angering artists at the time.