Photography or ‘promptography’: a year on from the Sony Awards AI furore, what is the nuanced view?

Boris Eldagsen, Pseudomnesia: The Electrician (2022). Eldagsen turned down a Sony award for this AI-generated image, to make the point that ‘AI is not photography’ © Boris Eldagsen, courtesy Sony World Photography Award
“From today, painting is dead,” Paul Delaroche famously declared after setting eyes on a collection of early photographs. And now, 185 years later, with the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI), some are hailing the death of photography.
“One of the things that people would say about photography, when it first took off in the 1840s and 50s, is that it can never be art because the machine is making the image,” says Phillip Toledano. The New York-based artist, primarily known for his conceptual photography projects, is about to publish his first collection of images created using AI, having begun experimenting with the technology 18 months ago. “Now, here we are again, saying exactly the same thing. And what that says to me is that we don’t really evolve as a species. We continue to be incredibly petty-minded. When confronted with something extraordinary, we only see the smallest in it.”
Toledano began posting his experiments with AI on Instagram last year. “It’s sort of like being a wizard,” he told his followers, describing what it is like to work with Midjourney, one of a new generation of AI tools able to generate credible, photorealistic images from descriptions input using natural language prompts rather than code. “You have to start with an idea, and then create a spell to conjure that idea into reality. The words count. The order of the words count. And then you must repeat the spell over and over again until you’re satisfied.”
“History and facts are options”: Phillip Toledano’s jellyfish (2023) from Another America © Phillip Toledano, courtesy of the artist
But when LensCulture, a popular photography platform, interviewed the British-born artist about one of the series that was evolving from his experiments, it generated more than a thousand comments on Instagram, most of them vitriolic, accusing him—and the platform —of betrayal. The irony wasn’t lost on Toledano. Another America, which will be published in book form by L’Artiere Edizioni later this month, emerged from a project he’d begun earlier looking at the divisions and contested truths that had taken hold in his adopted homeland.
“For people who believe in conspiracies, they are entirely real,” he explains. And so he set about inhabiting those alternative realities, reconstructing them “the old-fashioned way” through a set of photographs that took a lot of time and expense to complete. “And then AI shows up.”
Toledano has since spent a lot of time with the technology, creating various narrative sequences. One is Another America, set in the 1940s and 50s, “a time when photographic imagery held a unique sense of veracity”, which recreates surrealistic scenes of the strange, forgotten histories of a parallel universe. “For me, the thing that’s so interesting about this inflection point, historically speaking, is that AI makes it so that every lie, every conspiracy theory, can now have convincing visual evidence to say that it’s true. And that’s fascinating to me, this idea that history and facts are options that we now all choose. So the point of Another America is to demonstrate the elasticity of history that faces us.”
In spring 2023, another photographer who had also been investing a lot of time in AI had whipped up a bigger storm that brought the issue into the wider public realm. Boris Eldagsen had a similar taste for mischievous provocation, and so having entered an image—The Electrician, from his series Pseud­omnesia—in the Sony World Photography Awards and won one of the top categories, he had a surprise in store.
Travelling from his home in Berlin to the gala awards night at the London Hilton on Park Lane in April 2023, he took to the stage in a tuxedo to say that he would not accept his award. And when he made his reasons public, the story went viral. “How many of you knew or suspected that it was AI generated? Something about this doesn’t feel right, does it? AI images and photography should not compete with each other in an award like this. They are different entities. AI is not photography. Therefore I will not accept the award.”
Eldagsen was one of the first photographers in Germany to begin experimenting with AI. He got onto the waiting list for DALL-E 2 in the summer of 2022, giving him access to the beta version before it became publicly available. It was a watershed moment in the so-called “AI spring”, a boom time in the development and investment in an artificial intelligence ecosystem that was kickstarted a decade earlier. And now there were text-to-image models capable of delivering complex and convincing photorealistic images. OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 model was joined by Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, among others, and the technology was now available to the public.
He says that what he saw in thesummer of 2022 was a lack of awareness in the photography community about the speed of development of AI, “and I wanted to close that gap”. His stunt at the Sony Awards was about forcing the topic out into the open. And on those terms, it worked. The story exploded, appearing in The Guardian, The Times, the Daily Mail and others on 17 April 2023, and then going worldwide, featuring in everything from USA Today to the South China Morning Post.
Eldagsen says he sees himself as a knowledge transfer, a “good citizen” whosimply wants us to address the ethical questions that accompany the use of AI, and to think about its consequences. He has surely succeeded. “Suddenly, there is this impulse for debate. ‘What is art? Is it something uniquely human? Or can it be created by a machine?’ All of those conversations started… The debate is happening everywhere.”
In many instances, the photography world is still getting itself in a twist, he says, citing the recent controversy over World Press Photo, which highlights the best in international photojournalism. Last November the Amsterdam-based organisation announced that it would allow limited use of generative AI imagery in its Open Format category, which gives space to expanded practices and perspectives. But it quickly changed its mind following a huge outcry within the visual journalism community.
“It’s bullshit, because AI is not photography,” says Eldagsen, who says that AI can never replace authentic documentary modes. “Generated images are hallucinations. How can you mix that up? Of course, there is no absolute truth. But using AI is destroying it completely. The mistake that many people make is that they see AI-generated images as a logical evolution from photography.”
Eldagsen calls AI-generated imagery “promptography”, and despite his reservations, he remains an enthusiastic—if critical—exponent of this emerging art form, so long as its difference to photography is acknowledged. And now, one year after refusing the Sony award, he features in the exhibition Post-Photography: The Uncanny Valley (until 18 May), at Palmer Gallery, a new venue in northwest London, alongside the AI artists Nouf Aljowaysir and Ben Millar Cole.
“When you look at the broadly accepted narratives of art history, the story has been moved forward by artists who take risks with new technology, often artists who are much maligned at the time of making,” says Will Hainsworth, one of the gallery’s founders. “The job of the young gallery is to be open-minded to these kinds of developments.”
Lucas Giles, Palmer Gallery’s co-founder, sees huge potential in artists collaborating with AI. “I believe that artificial intelligence represents the most significant technological evolution in art since the advent of photography in the 19th century,” Giles says. “Art has a crucial role in advancing the discussion about our relationship with AI and how we as humans perceive the technology. The current discourse often tends to be binary, oscillating between utopian optimism and dystopian fear. Art can offer a more nuanced and reflective lens through which the multifaceted implications of AI can be explored, both positive and negative.”

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