AI Photo wins at Sony World Photography Awards, Amazon and Google have news
Controversy is once again in the spotlight after AI generated image wins the Creative category at Sony World Photography Awards 2023.
Here’s a good one: German artist Boris Eldagsen participated this year in the World Photography Organization’s Sony World Photography Awards, a leading photo contest, with a “photo” that is the result of a complex technique that consists of prompt engineering, inpainting, and outpainting.
After he won, he traveled to London at his own expense, suited up, climbed on stage, and refused the award like a boss.
The dude knew what he was doing all along and after he refused to accept the prize, he explained the experiment and took the opportunity to address the big elegant in the room. He wants to speed up the debate about how prepared are official photography and art competitions for AI content.
And right he is, no one is prepared for the advancement in AI but we need t keep up. This experiment should be a wake-up call for people involved in anything creative. AI is here to stay and while it is hard to predict (as I said countless times) how it will evolve, it’s clear as day that content consumption and content creation have already changed forever.
As noted in a follow-up interview and in an address on his blog, Boris is a former photographer that turned to AI and is now trying to evolve and promote digitally produced images with the help of artificial intelligence. A move that I think will be made by more artists in the coming years.
You can see below the winning image:
Amazon joins the party
Bedrock is Amazon’s new Generative AI platform. After playing fetch with other players like Stability AI and HiggingFace, AWS goes full force with an offer aimed at large customers building “enterprise-scale” AI apps.
Bedrock customers will be able to build generative AI-powered apps via pre-trained models from startups including AI21 Labs, Antrophic, and Stability AI. Available in a “limited preview,” Bedrock also offers access to Titan foundation models, a family of models trained in-house by AWS.
Amazon also announced that CodeWhisperer, its AI-powered code-generating service, is now free of charge to developers without any usage restrictions. The competition, Microsoft Copilot, has already amassed over 1 million users.
So now we have consistent AI tools from all the top three Cloud providers. Both Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure are also engaged in seducing enterprise customers with AI goodies as part of their cloud offerings.
The generative AI market could be worth close to $110 billion by 2030, according to estimates from Grand View Research. And I think this is an undervaluation.
Speaking of Google… the tech giant gave access to CBS journalists to their AI plans and offered an early exclusive preview of their text-to-video AI model.
Looked pretty cool, but is still not ready for release. You can see it in action in the video below.
Aaaaand in other, more important news, Substack released Notes a kind of Twitter alternative that looks very promising. I just published my first note on Substack Notes, and I would love for you to join me there!
Notes is a new space on Substack for us to share links, short posts, quotes, photos, and more. I plan to use it for things that don’t fit in the newsletter, like work-in-progress or quick questions.
How to join
Head to substack.com/notes or find the “Notes” tab in the Substack app. As a subscriber to The AI-magination Station, you’ll automatically see my notes. Feel free to like, reply, or share them around!
You can also share notes of your own. I hope this becomes a space where every reader of The AI-magination Station can share thoughts, ideas, and interesting quotes from the things we're reading on Substack and beyond.