Human body, esp. brain (or more broadly even nature) has a motivation to do more with less energy expenditure.

Drugs allows you to cope with hard things or allows you to escape the toll you have to pay.

Similarly, AI allows brain to do more with less energy expenditure. This is why it looks so tasty and is very addictive.

Your brain doesn't work at that hard, AI allows this, however there's no free lunch on that planet. The effort you give into something returns as quality and finesse, however it's tiring as well.

Addiction is a complex is a hard problem regardless what you are addicted to, it's not a light or easy matter to discuss, though.

Why do we use a shovel instead of our hands? Why do we use cars instead of walking? Why do we use libraries instead of writing all the functions ourselves?

The issue here is you're trying to make something a binary that is a continuum. Humans are tool users and the vast majority of animals depend wholly on their bodies to accomplish everything. It's our greatest strength and weakness.

>We are so much better at creating new things

Are we? If this were really true we'd have had rockets at least 10 thousand years ago if not more. Actual 'new' creations that are not mixes of previous things are incredibly rare and most of those are found by shear luck with interacting with the natural world. We love telling ourselves a particular story about how creative and wonderful and fucking great we are but the vast majority of human behavior, including my own is just an iterative copy of other humans behavior.

I don't think that's an honest summary of what happened. It seems like every other scientist was pointing out aspects of the submission that were clearly generated by AI. things appearing out of nowhere or behaviors and appearances that don't match reality at all. it's pretty clear AI was not used purely to post process b/w source images. Or at the very least, was not used responsibly. Whether or not he intended to cheat, the lack of discipline is pretty egregious

What you see as evidence of a weak case I see as evidence of the judges being responsibly cautious, and affording the photographer every reasonable opportunity to make their case. I would need to see additional evidence before I took a statement beginning "at this time..." as stronger evidence than something subsequently stated by the same party.

As it happens, the final decision is not that the disqualified photographer was intentionally cheating, but that the video was ineligible for the competition.

Did he ever share the raw source?

They were giving him the opportunity to withdraw the submission.

> AI-assisted autofocus, subject tracking...

This is already present for the last decade. It's the foundation which makes "sports DSLRs" possible. AI here is not what we know as today's "AI". These are specialized models baked into DSPs to run at inhuman speeds. In Sony's case it's phase data, image itself, information from the lens, and sometimes the accelerometers on camera. This is not making something up from thin air.

AI assisted autofocus is smarter phase detect autofocus. Subject tracking is an educated guess for where the focus shall move, based on movements in the image.

My ~20 year old Nikon D70s has a 1004 pixel "scene detection and metering" sensor "trained" on thousands of images to make educated guesses in full-frame metering mode to exposure correctly. This is in no way helping or altering the image in any way. Same for faster autofocus and object tracking.

Exposure, white balance, noise reduction, color correction, HDR et al can be all achieved with deterministic and traditional algorithms as well. Some of these processes have history in film photography and carried over to digital from analog. Some photographers are famous for their darkroom treatment of their shots during development.

Processing an image with deterministic algorithms using the data in the raw photo is fine. This is how darkrooms work as well. However, guessing things, altering images by adding something which was not there and claiming otherwise is not acceptable. This can be a new element inside the scene or pixel details which was not resolvable by the lens/sensor/film to begin with. Both are "photomanipulation", not photography.

I feel like the distinction comes down to "edited" vs "generated", but even here the line can be blurry. For example, is AI denoise really just removing noise from an image, or is it generating a new image of what it thinks the original signal was?

In a news broadcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sz3V9398LEY

Read the article and see the video there

There are low-integrity folks who are willing to risk getting caught for fakery in public spaces in trade for the promise of notoriety.

Chicanery seems to scale anywhere that there are insufficient institutional barriers.

Publish or perish. The stakes are incredibly high. Cheating may be the difference between keeping and losing your job.

Especially since everyone else is aware of that. If you don't take the risk, you will lose to someone who did and got away with it.

This researcher is in China, where I gather the competition is even fiercer than in the West. I do not know that for a fact, but if it is true it makes it even clearer.

Viewed that way it's not foolish. It's actually mandatory. And it's just going to get more prominent as the AI makes fewer mistakes, and competitors get better at spotting and removing them.