The contest was for a high quality entry that is real. The AI entry wasn't real, so its quality is utterly immaterial and irrelevant to the discussion.

You can make an ultra high quality fake check and deposit it and yet it will still bounce because it turns out the quality is irrelevant if it isn't real.

It also didn't win. By definition a disqualified entry is not a winning entry. That is what the entire article is about, if you read it! The winning entry is here: https://www.nikonsmallworld.com/galleries/2026-small-world-i...

You can have a high quality fraud.

Quality and veracity are independent (orthogonal) axes, but we are used to them being correlated, so some people conflate the two.

A knock-off Chanel handbag likely won’t be as good quality as the original, but it could be even better! Even so, it wouldn’t be authentic.

I do not respect anyone that commits fraud with AI. They are just like Bernard Lawrence Madoff, trash! No different then the 1990s baseball players that used steroids to break records.

You've chosen a really bizarre hill to die on here.

"In the beauty contest, the faked picture of a composite girl won! Therefore she is the most beautifulest even though she never existed in the first place! Checkmate, people who don't like my waifu!" /s

Fraud commits fraud using fraud tool because they don't have the skills to win competition and are too lazy to develop them.

Sounds like a sloppy way to win to me.

Look, I put tokens through transformers all day long and am amazed at what they can do, probably just like you. But imagine a Tour de France cyclist wins but is found to be using a hidden ebike motor. But they won and fooled everyone! So what?

The winning submission was SCIENTIFIC FRAUD claiming to be from a medical instrument. The competition was not to produce something that was aesthetically pleasing or that would pass as real images recorded from a camera. Just like the point of the Tour de France is not to be the very fastest in any 2 wheeled vehicle.

But you're right, this isn't slop, it's worse. It's an entitlement that comes with the worst parts of tech hype grifter scenes like NFTs and crypto altcoins. If you can get away with lying and cheating, then it is not just morally okay but a moral obligation.

To actually answer your question its perfectly clear in a lot of cases that it is slop and theres some simply reasons why slop can win. 1. Generating ai slop is clearly less intensive than producing a real photograph, painting, drawing, etc.

2. Judges for competitions see a lot of stuff - tend to do it quickly - and theres a lot of randomness to who wins. I also just think that judges are often fairly terrible - maybe the incentives just dont exist for getting good judges, especially for competitions (unlike the Nikon one of course) which are smaller e.g. design a poster for our country fair.

So its easy to see that 1. means that the ratio of slop to real can be very high and by 2. the judging process is typically partly random and pretty fallible, so its easy to see how slop can win.

On the judge point, slop appeals to the average and the average is very approachable - so its often the case that people actually prefer ai art to work that is produced from out of an individuals unique experience and vision, which takes more effort to engage with.

Sure, go for it.