In a world first, phone manufacturer Huawei have launched a photography competition which sees their phone’s artificial intelligence serve as one of the judges.
It’s no secret that AI is developing at an alarming rate. A few months back, NVIDIA announced their Content-Aware Fill tool that can “guess” missing parts of an image pretty damn accurately. The same company also developed an AI that can “merge” aesthetics from two different photos.
Perhaps it’s unsurprising to learn then that AI was able to “score” photos based on their technical quality. All of the above has accumulated into the world’s first AI-based photography competition.
A professional (and human) Leica photographer forms the other half of the judging panel.
Fittingly titled the “Spark a RenAIssance Photo Challenge,” anyone considering entering will take part in five photo tasks: a New RenAIssance challenge, After Dark challenge, Deep in Detail challenge, Moment in Time challenge, and Wide-Eyed World challenge. Should your photo impress both the human and AI judge, you’ll be the proud owner of a P20 Pro smartphone (RRP $1,100), which were announced by Huawei back in March 2018, as well as a Leica Masterclass in Florence.
Details for the contest are available on the Huawei website, as well as its terms and conditions.
You might want to mention that the contest is only for a limited number of countries, and not as world wide as you might imagine.
"3.1
This Promotion is only open to legal residents of Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the Republic of Ireland, and the United Kingdom, who are aged 16 and over."
Once I am artificially a legal resident of all of those countries I will have 10 more chances ! I will have my robot thank their robot for the digital gold medal my automatic camera is sure to win. But I will press the button.
This seems really dumb. If there is one thing any good photograph should do, it's spark human emotion in the viewer. Some of the most revered photographs in history are mostly out of focus, or underexposed, and would get a poor rating on any AI scale. The only place this may work is in something like Macro photography. Otherwise, the AI score should account for maybe 10% of the overall score.
I've submitted some images for fun - even my most "renaissance" ones ; it got rejected hahahaha