In any case, perhaps some kind of hardware-signed cryptography scheme on the files from the camera could be used in lieu of this development in the future.
RAW files generated "backwards" do already exist. For this, police and forensics have been using special cameras with hardware signatures for raw files for around 15 years, but Canon's and Nikon's system was broken by Elcomsoft like 12 years ago. Sony is trying something similar in their A7 IV, but I don't know how serious it is, and I think it's not as oriented to forensics as Canon and Nikon was.
https://www.elcomsoft.com/news/428.html
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/elcomsoft-claims-to...
https://m.dpreview.com/news/5658217744/sony-a7-iv-gets-anti-...
"Editable" artificial images?
I'll admit those are stretches. Anyway, in addition to a digital signing scheme, these competitions are gonna need more editing restrictions if they want to exclude the use of diffusion models.
The author traveled to the ceremony at his own expense, found that he was not allocated time to speak, then went onstage unannounced to explain his refusal, at which point all physical evidence of his work was removed from the facility, again without comment.
I agree that Sony could have saved itself trouble by requiring the raw camera footage with verifiable exif data.
Feels dystopian that they would just, scrub the winning work from the website and physical location without comment, pretending as if it didn't happen.
the fact that he was able to enter at all with a non-photo is proof that Sony is in the wrong, and despite their coverup, is not, in fact, prepared to deal with "black-hat artists" in this space
when an inadequacy makes itself apparent, the decent thing to do is acknowledge it, thank anyone who helped you see it, and try to make it right – Sony did none of these things, and thus are the "indecent" ones here
Sony problem was in not catching someone who wanted to embarrass them. There's not a good way to detect that in advance.
Sony makes cameras; signing the image in the exif with a public key would establish authenticity.
This event isn't likely to spur that change, but it may well come.
- Changing the style of the whole photo to (for instance) make it look old and analog.
- "Enhancing" it with HDR, depth of field, focus everywhere or something like that.
- Altering exposure beyond what you could get out of a underexposed/overexposed RAW file.
- Stylizing the human subjects to make them look more attractive, more grimey or whatever
All these things could arguably be done in photoshop, but its just very labor intensive and more hit-or-miss. Hence the contest rules would have to exclude most photoshop work if they want to exclude diffusion.
Photos used for editorial purposes in newspapers and magazines at least historically had pretty strict rules about manipulation generally--including the removal of distracting elements that had nothing really to do with the core "truth" of the photo. I suppose the thinking was that manipulation can quickly become a slippery slope.
You're basically putting photos in front of people who've seen it all. They're not impressed by technical perfection or what gets 90+ on 500px.
edit: It's more likely your friend was losing out to people who could take more photos and be more experimental due to not being limited by the the cost of film or delay of development. Film can't touch digital's feedback loop.
There is a big distance between filters which tweak an existing image and generating an image from nothing.
And its literally a continuum from "leave the image 99.9% unchanged" to "change 99.9% of the image"
Even in traditional film photography, you can easily get "untrue" pictures. Film is sensitive to UV and near infrared, so filters can create very unreal imagery. And multiple exposure can do all sorts of tricks. The averaging of many faces together, creating a sort of uncanny valley result, was first done in the analog, stacking aligned photos with multiple exposure.
This is generally still considered photography. Art photography, if it's any good.
One could say the key element is the artist combining actual scenes that were exposed to film or a sensor. Perhaps massaged a bit in the dark room or digitally. But the core material is exposed images from actual scenes. It's photography while that element remains dominant. But then again ... isn't that sort of what these generative AIs also do? It's all originally derived from actual photographs.
Trouble is, his work wasn't img2img, there was no initial image as input
Maybe "photography" contests should be more strict, with only specific processing filters allowed.