“In the latter case, however, AI is creating the image, not me. Even though the source pixels may have come from my own image stock, and AI is following a set of criteria that I provide, the resulting image is a surprise….and so it is not really my creation. I don’t believe these should currently be eligible for any SRPS competition.”
The magnitude, scale and speed are vastly greater. However, rules are incredibly difficult to write without ambiguities.
Who (or what) is the source of the suggested result? When someone is mentoring a member (i.e., Tony, hypothetically) and Tony says, “The way you cropped your image focuses on what you believe to be the subject, but if you crop it differently, it emphasizes what I believe to be the much more intriguing subject in your image.”
As a result, the member notices something that they hadn’t seen before (and hopefully learns to notice other ways of interpreting a scene whether composing a shot or examining in post), and proceeds to enter that into competition. Whether an AI scan of 100,000 of your images reveals many suggested composites or just examines each image individually and highlights by cropping and other post-processing techniques refining the 100 images that are most striking, and some of those are entered into competition, where do you draw the line in the rules? Do you throw the baby out with the bath water and ban mentoring? We are about learning and honing our skills, and AI is revealing incredible ideas. The new skill that we all need to hone is how to have a conversation with AI to elicit and amplify what starts as a thought that is uniquely our own.
Using the Renaissance artist Jacques Louis David as a seed, I asked, “In the style of Jacques Louis David, Minutemen and Redcoats are having a bacchanal at the Boston Tea Party.” :
What if you asked, “What images among my 100,000 come closest to the style of Jacques Louis David for the number, positioning and expressions of people in the image?”, and see what results? And, using the resulting 100 images, ask the AI to composite elements from them into a result that comes as close as possible to that artists’s style? Realistically, an expert in Photoshop who is also knowledgeably credentialed regarding Renaissance artists could do this for 100 of your images, but not 100,000. Where do you unambiguously draw the line?