BONUS EPISODE: Boris Eldagsen: Why AI-Generated Images Aren’t Photography

0:00Welcome to this very special episode of Beyond the Prompt. This is a bonus episode where we feature an amazing artist who is using AI to transform his photography practice. If you're a regular listener, hopefully you enjoy this bonus episode. If you're not a regular listener, please know that our typical show features more business application and less artistic expression. But this conversation was so spectacular. And this leader is such an amazing person that we couldn't withhold the conversation from our audience. Hope you enjoy. And we'll be back next week with another normally scheduled episode of Beyond the Prompt.

0:41My name is Boris Eldachsen. I'm a Berlin-based artist working with photography, video, and installation. and since three years I'm working only with AI image generators. And last year I became famous for refusing the Sony World Photo Awards because I applied with an AI-generated image. Boris, I thought just to give our listeners context, if we could almost work backwards through your history a bit, and perhaps for those who aren't familiar with your work, if we could start with the moment you refused an award, What was the award you refused and what were the grounds by which you refused it? Well, it was the Sony World Photography Awards.

1:29And I was selected as the winner in the Open Creative category. And my decision grew over two months. I applied for the competition to make a test, to find out if photo competitions are aware of the new situations, that people are going to hand in AI-generated images. And I had no plan B. I just applied, and I was surprised to see that one and the same image, the electrician, made it to the finalists in three different competitions. And the Sony World Photo Award then decided to have me as a winner. When they told me their decision, I immediately replied, making it transparent that the image is not photography that it was ai generated and i offered either to disqualify me or if they would like to go ahead to have an open conversation about the problems that the photo community is going to face and they have not been interested in doing one or the other and many of my questions and attempts to have an open conversation have not been replied to.

2:47When they sent out a press release about the winners, it was not transparent that my image was not photography. Inquiries by the press has been left unanswered. So, yeah, at some point when they promised me to have a Q &A before the award ceremony and didn't keep that promise, I had no other option than to refuse the award because I didn't apply to win anything. I wanted to initiate a conversation, and I hoped to spark off that conversation with my refusal. And so why do you think they are failing to engage? And why is it so important to you that they engage? Would you talk about that? I know that your background is in philosophy and art, so can you talk to us a little bit about why you think it's so important and perhaps why they're refusing?

3:43Well, I think you need to take into account that the competition is a business. It's run by a London-based agency that specializes in those awards. They run several awards in different disciplines. And for Sony, it's a marketing campaign. I don't think that Sony was informed, and I think for the agency, it was just something they couldn't bother about, because their focus was to have a proper award ceremony and to keep the Japanese guests happy. And anything else, I don't know. I still don't understand why they didn't use the opportunity for good. Because I told them openly in an email that they can be a first mover.

4:34They can be the first big competition to acknowledge the problem and to talk about it. And they didn't. How would you, I mean, I very much agree with like the whole premise of it and obviously have many questions. that arise also. But maybe we can go through some of the questions that you were hoping they were asked or some of the questions that you were hoping would be discussed as part of this. And then maybe we can discuss some of them. And then after that, I would love to be a little bit more tactical and hear a little bit more about how you work with AI now as part of your journey of creating art.

5:14But if we start with the questions, what do you think the questions are that we are not asking in this space? Well, for photo competitions, it's very important to define what is photography and what is not. And you have two teams. One team is thinking from the end, saying it looks like photography. Why can't we say AI-generated images are the next step in the development of photography? and then you have the team that I belong to that say, no, photography is generating images with light, is making images with light. And you go out into the world, you are present, you experience something with whatever is in front of your camera.

5:59And if you generate images with AI, you don't need that. You can sit in a dark cellar, you need the internet, your machine, a laptop well that's it so there is a big difference it doesn't matter if it looks the same and for this I think competitions should not put those two categories of images in one basket they should open up a new category for generated images and many competitions do so so when you have just so this is not to calendar because it's not a space that I understand a lot about. But when you take a high-end camera of today with the lenses that you can have and stabilization that are built into them, doesn't that become very complicated to define photography as you physically have to be standing in front of the event when that can be so many things?

6:59I think there is a lot of technology and also AI inbuilt in the cameras we use, especially in smartphones. But still, it's lens-based. There is light being reflected from something that generates the image. It's a different workflow. And it doesn't matter if the result looks like photography or not. It's also a very photo-centric way of thinking that we only talk about photography. You can generate images with AI that look like drawing, like painting, 3D animations anything so this is why I suggested we need a new terminology for this kind of images and the one that I found and that convinced me personally is promptography because it shows that the image was generated with a prompt it's just a such a thoughtful kind of way of thinking about it I guess the promptography has a little bit of the I would imagine the people who see their work as being art but being generated through algorithms would feel that the word itself has a little bit of a gimmicky kind of tone to it and so that there is value judgments in already being prescribed into that kind of way of describing it would you understand that statement?

8:26How do you understand art? I think that is a question that is very interesting. And then many people confuse how you work with an AI image generator. They think that an artist can be replaced totally by the machine. For me, this is a very poor understanding of art. And it's also not seeing how complex it actually is. And that if you have an experience in image making, if you have an experience and a knowledge of the platforms and you know the strengths and weaknesses, then you can use it as a tool. It becomes like a brush, like a camera, and it offers new possibilities. opportunities um for me art is something that should give you an an impulse for an inner journey yeah that you not ask yourself what does the artist want to tell me yeah i think that is a very boring question and if i want to tell an audience something i would write an article in the paper it's very patronizing to think so um an artwork should give an impulse to an inner journey yeah it's more interesting to ask yourself what kind of memories emotions thoughts are triggered by the artwork do i like it am i attracted am i appalled why and that is for me what art should do but that's my personal understanding and if you go to the philosophy of arts you have many contradicting definitions i very much agree with that where my head goes though is i went to a conference where some of the artists that are creating what i think is the latest in the nft space on the crypto spaces which is this algorithms that creates art right where the beauty of the piece is that an algorithm was defined for by something and that that generated imagery and so the imagery is really a something that is representative of that thought right so it's a system that you get fascinated by rather than the imagery as you look at photography and you look at like the purity of the object having been exposed to light is that only in terms of photography or do you find that digital art as it were is something different and so therefore we need to kind of create all these different categories that defined the medium in which the artists use to express themselves?

11:08Well, I think AI is part of digital art. And it's another way that we haven't used before. You know, one thing that I've been thinking as you've been speaking is, on the one hand, folks can say, well, it's just definitions. But on the other hand, definitions really matter, right? And so, for example, you would not submit a photo into a painting competition. It's like, you know, as they say, it's like bringing a gun to a sword fight. or something, right? It's just a different medium. And I don't mean, you know, more powerful, less powerful. It's different. You also wouldn't bring a painting to a photography competition, right?

11:45And yet all of them are images, right? As long as we're talking about the output being an image without regard to the manner of generation, then a sketch and an oil painting and a photograph and cryptography or promptography or whatever could all do it. But insofar as the competition is actually about the means of production. I think the definitions matter tremendously and that's really what you're getting at. I would love for you to maybe now speak a little bit about your experience in your career as a photographer. And then I know because you've been immersed in promptography, if you wouldn't mind to first tell us about your practice and process with photography and then compare and contrast.

12:32How is promptography similar or different? When you photograph, you are dealing with matter in front of the camera. And I had two different ways. One was going out at night and looking out for light sources. And when I found a situation that was like a perfect stage, then I was waiting for something to happen. And life always surprised me. And the images later, they looked like staged, but they had strictly been photographed in a street photography manner without altering what was happening in front of my camera. And I also did staged photography where I had my models mainly then in-house in the studio situation because in winter in Berlin, it's too cold to go outside for longer.

13:26and those two ways of photographing I mixed in the past and working with people in stage photography you are a director like in a theater play you need to decide about the background the light the props the pose anything the model and and what you want to express and that was a very good preparation for me to work with AI image generators. What I like about AI is that now I work not with matter, I work with my knowledge and experience. Because I know how light works, I know what kind of keywords to use to describe a composition, a foreground, a middle ground, the background to describe color, to describe light, to use references.

14:20You can also use keywords that describe a camera, specific camera, lens, film type. And the AI is going to generate an image that looks like you have used a specific kind of camera and film. So that is the material I work with, my experience. But at the same time, I can generate images purely out of my imagination. And that is my limit. Anything I can imagine, I can kind of generate. And I'm not dependent on the light outside, the temperature, the technology I have, the location, the people. For me, it's artistic freedom to work with AI image generators. And I use them in a way that I'm not doing the same thing, the same kind of images I did in the past.

15:20I want to do something that I have not been able to do as a photographer in 30 years. I would like to go beyond. And that is very exciting because the features still are released sometimes on a weekly basis. There are no handbooks. There is a lot of experimentation possible. You know, one thing that I love about what you're saying, Boris, is you're only limited by your imagination and you're limited by your experience, right? And when you talk about things like the light, the lens, the film, et cetera, on the one hand, someone could criticize. I remember, you know, in the early days of photography, people criticized a photograph because it's just pushing a shutter, right?

15:59And yet when you realize, no, there's angle and light and lens and temperature and paper and film, all that stuff, right? has a tremendous impact and it's only by experiencing them by changing your shutter speed or the aperture or focal length or whatever right that you start to gain an appreciation for composition and how a photograph is created that you start to see it's actually not dissimilar from painting there's different brush strokes and different colors and different ways of mixing etc the the thing that's interesting is how would you recommend or the thing that i find myself wondering is I am an amateur photographer and I've taken some introductory photography classes and those classes have taught me how to appreciate things like shutter speed, focal length, film type, lens type, et cetera.

16:50How do you recommend someone start to learn the basics of promptography? Because right now what you mentioned was you're limited by your imagination and your experience. For someone who perhaps doesn't have experience in photography, how do they start to build a catalog of skills in promptography? I would recommend to do a basic workshop that gives an introduction into the platforms and how to use text prompts and how to use existing images. I have been teaching those workshops for one and a half years now. So you have a basis to start from and everything else is just exploring the beauty about the references that you can use to make a difference is that you find it all on the internet the community has been very active in the last two years so if you want to see what kind of analog film type what what kind of result an analog film is going to give you, what a daguerotope, syrenotope, any old photographic techniques is going to look like.

18:04You find webpages that show you. You find webpages that have lists of artists and their style to inspire you or to use as a reference. You have webpages that list all the different types of lighting. I would have loved to have such easy access to resources when I was a student. I think once you have figured out that you need to learn those keywords, it's very easy to find them on the internet. Yeah, it's, it's, you know, what you're saying in a way is it's actually easier to learn than ever before, but it's a matter of investing the time and effort to even find rabbit holes to go down. Yes. And I also think it's, it can give you an additional motivation to do so.

18:53Many universities or schools dislike AI because they think that students are going to be lazy and they don't learn what they could have learned in the past. I think it could also be just the opposite, that they get additional motivation to do their own research. Yeah, there's so much more inspiration available. The surface area is just enormous. And so if you think about the job of the teacher is to inspire a hunger for knowledge, there's now much more available to students than there ever was before. Totally right. What's your sense of the singularity of promptography and photography? You mean the difference of each?

19:39no more the the as with many new mediums uh young artists seem to kind of take different medium and smash them together and so it seems feasible that we're going to start one one thing that brings to mind was i saw somebody who created and uh i don't know what you even would call it but They created glasses and then they had AI basically render. They walked around, a camera took pictures, then translated those pictures to text, then re-prompted that text into AI and then displayed them in these glasses, right? And so what they were saying was the real world, but as articulated through an AI, which obviously is a way to try to make commentary on what is real and what is not.

20:32And so in your mind, where does the world move when it comes to AI and photography? Or maybe your point is simply that they should be kept completely separate. Well, I think from all the tasks that have been given to photography, only the documentary part will remain that can't be replaced or augmented by AI. and if we go back in history and Jeremy was quoting the early days of photography when painters hated photography and Charles Baudelaire the French poet called photography as a tool for the untalented and failed painters the rise of photography enabled painting to go wild and to leave the job of representation behind and now the rise of ai will do just the opposite what is left for photography is an authentic image of the world to give a representation that is documentary and anything else can be replaced by ai or augmented by ai but the authentic image yeah as we had it kind of secured with photography for many years as a proof of document, is under attack through AI because we will not be able to differentiate what has been photographed, what is authentic and what is generated.

22:10And that is a big problem we need to face as democracies. But for the medium photography, it's kind of sad that it's not going to define its own future. The future of photography is defined by AI and photography can, yeah, there's something left to it and I don't know where it's going to head. If you look at the university system, when I was a student in the 90s at art schools, each art university academy had a class of photography. Most of them have disappeared. It's less important today. And if you look at technological universities, photography is dissolved into something that is often called digital imagery.

23:01And then you can have anything subsumized under this terminology. It can be photography, it can be CGI, it can be AI-generated images. What do you hope that if we roll the clock forward a year and Sony Awards are highlighting an image that you have submitted, how do you hope the conversation advances? the conversation did advance much more than i thought because a it became a global conversation that is not only about photo competitions but about the nature of art the disinformation potential of fake images and many competitions and photo festivals have debated how to continue if you look at Sony I think Sony still didn't do their homework there was only one press release from Sony that was partially wrong telling that it was okay that they gave me the award and that I was behaving strangely but later for the running competition of the last months they changed the guidelines secretly they didn't even send out a press release about it you had to look it up in the nitty-gritty of the guidelines and they said in the creative category you can use photoshop and be creative but you need to start with an analog or digital photo you can't start with a generated image and that shows that they don't understand how it actually works.

24:50You can generate images by starting with analog and digital photography. You blend it, you do an image prompt and then the actual result is AI-generated image. So according to the new guidelines, I could apply with an AI-generated image. They didn't do their homework properly And then you have other competitions that very clearly define what is photography, that AI-generated images are not photography, and that you can't apply with such an image. Do you think that you're going to gravitate to AI, or do you think that you're a photographer to the bone, and so therefore? It's mixed. I've been photographing for 30 years and now for the last two years I work non-stop with AI but there are crossovers A.

25:50I use my knowledge as an artist as a photographer and B. I've done two projects where I actually mix real photography and generated images but in a way that you can differentiate what is what and I think I would like to continue this exploration in the future, mixing the two mediums. What would you call that then? That's a mix of photography and frontography. And as an art piece in itself, it's often an installation. Can you tell us a little bit about your mindset? Because unlike the painters who shunned photography, you're a photographer who's actually embraced and experimented with AI. Why do you think you have approached it the way you have?

26:41And what can other photographers learn from your journey? I think because I have always been more than a photographer. I started with drawings. I loved painting. Most of my friends were painters, but I couldn't think like them. And somehow from drawing, I continued with photography. And I ended up doing photographs that have a painterly quality. and in photography I did a lot of staged images and that was a good training because if you stage things or if you draw things you are also working out from your imagination. Many photographers react. They are out in the world, they are present, they choose a certain place and people but then they are erecting intuitively and if you stage you need to be able to imagine the image that you are building step by step so it's a different workflow and that enabled me to enter the ai world very easily and then when i started in summer 22 for personal reasons it was also the only option I had to be creative.

27:59My partner got a cancer diagnosis and we spent weeks and weeks in doctor's offices and hospital waiting rooms. And the only way for me to find a balance and to be creative was to work with my smartphone and play around with image generators. so that sparked it off yeah and can you talk about the role of surprise because you you mentioned earlier in regards to photography some of your photos look staged but what what i take from that is something happens that you couldn't have expected but then that actually is what makes the photo can you talk about the role of surprise in promptography it's the same and that That is something that many photographers dislike.

28:51They say, you don't know what you're getting out of that machine. You click generate and then you get a surprise. How can you actually tell people that you are the author if you don't know what's going to happen? And I reply that this is exactly the beauty of photography. I have been going to the same place in Berlin at Museums Island for over 15 years at night it was never boring I was always surprised by what happened there and who did what and this is what actually is something that I'm also missing yeah photographing less that you go out that you have an unexpected experience. And I see many similarities between photographing and generating images or drawings.

29:45If you do drawings, you start somewhere. Often you don't know how to finish. In between you realize a certain part didn't work. You erase it. You start again. You can do the same with AI. Can you tell us about the first time you had one of those surprises? Maybe it was in the hospital waiting room perhaps, but can you tell us about the first time you go, oh, I didn't think it was going to do that. Yeah, it was summer 22. I don't know what kind of images it was, but it was fascinating and highly addictive. Yeah, and that is most people when you start, you realize, wow, it is so different to create images.

30:25It's very hard to stop.

30:30and I'm still very excited and love working with it. The last time I had this was in my early days when I was a student of art and now I can explore so many new things but I have 30 years of experience that I can use. That is a situation that I would have never thought possible. what kind of tips would you offer people like myself who don't have 30 years of experience in photography and who are just starting to play with this new medium um how do i make better images i think a by doing i still recommend to get a kickoff workshop and then to explore and to follow other people and to have an exchange with them and try to learn from others.

31:29There are many groups that have an exchange on this on Discord, but also on social media platforms like Facebook and others. And go and research pages that help you with keywords. So it all goes back to your interests. What would you like to generate? How do you want this image to look like? what I like about AI image generators is that it can be a tool for an inner journey because you have to formulate what you would like to get you have to ask yourself what is my interest, what are my sources of inspiration what kind of images do I like and that is a self-exploration where AI can help you Can you talk a little bit about volume.

32:28What does it take to actually get the image either gets to the point of surprise or to the point of that's what I wanted to get? How long are your typical interactions with AI? And how do you persist or nudge in a direction that where you get surprised, but you also get where you're hoping to go? My workflows become longer and longer. But with photography, how many pictures do you take until you have that one special great image i combine different workflows and i combine different platforms so i can give you an example um last year i did a project where i started with text just describing certain situations to generate images and those images they were not special not exciting they were just material and the next step i was blending those images and that is a basic mid-journey function option it's two images become one it's not a collage it's more like mommy daddy child yeah you see that it is connected but it's something new and these images again are only an interim product the next step was to use those blended images and to create an image prompt that is a text describing what you would like to have plus an image or more images as references that is going to take it further this you can do many times and then when you arrive at an image where you say oh i see a potential here but there's something missing then you erase certain parts and have them generated again and again or you add pixels and enlarge the canvas that can take many different steps so at the end to generate such an image is not one step but maybe 150 steps and then you can also change platforms combine platforms with each project i try to explore a new workflow and it becomes complex also to know what are the strengths and weaknesses you can generate certain images in mid-journey because it has certain features but it's highly censored and then you continue in an in-painting out-painting platform that means replacing certain parts or adding pixels you use a different tool, something that is less restricted there are so many options of combinations it's the main problem that everybody has working with ai image generators right now is time because you have less time than you have options and tools to explore that's incredible can you tell us the the last workflow change you made and and what inspired it you said every time you create an image you're trying a new workflow where do you go to get inspired regarding potential workflow changes?

35:41I have an exchange with some of my expert colleagues in Germany, and sometimes there is a different approach, something that I haven't thought of. What you can do with AI is also upscale. That means enlarging an image. We use a very blurry image, and you can upscale it and sharpen it, and at the end, you can actually have a sharp image yeah you see what's on there and a colleague of mine used an image normal size like 2 000 pixels and he decreased the size from 2 000 to 50 pixels and then it's just some pixels with different color and then with an upscaler he upscaled it again to 4 000 pixels so what you get out of this process is something completely different than the initial image and that is a workflow that i didn't think of in the past but it makes sense you can also play around with language like the basic suggestion you have from open ai to text prompt is american football player painted by van Gogh and i always use a reference pizza so you can have a pizza painted by van Gogh and I say yeah you can do it it's kind of boring what about pizza photographed by van Gogh because we don't know he if he photographed I don't think so that's great and that's great and then yeah but you can go even further and turn it upside down and you can say what about van Gogh being photographed by a pizza and you always get a result and great Right.

37:31You don't know what you get. You can just close your eyes and kind of play piano on your desktop and see what kind of random letters you typed. And it's going to create an image. There's a lot of room for experimentation. That's beautiful. That's absolutely beautiful. I would love to see a photograph of Van Gogh as photographed by pizza. Now, would Supreme Pizza photograph differently than pepperoni, perhaps? I don't know, but out of this process, I got a pizza that really looks like Van Gogh, which is like spinach as a background and Spanish chorizo pizza as the skin. And it's kind of like, it's a good business idea.

38:15If you have a pizzeria in the birthplace of Van Gogh, you could offer this kind of design. That shows that AI image generators, you can use it for different purposes. You can use it just as a sparring partner to be inspired, to generate ideas. You can use it to analyze data, text or images. You can use it to produce new images or you can use it for post-production or all of them. And it's up to you what you were aiming at. not to take us too far off track but are there other ai tools that you find yourself leaning on or using regularly and if so when and why do you use them right now i'm exploring the potential of nudify apps and that actually is exactly what it says you have a picture of a person in clothes and you can strip them naked you also have apps that do just the opposite.

39:22You can have naked people and dress them up. And that is something to work around the restrictions of mid-journey. And it's also, I'm exploring right now the potential of upscalers. What they do is not just creating a larger resolution out of an image. New upscalers can also use text prompts, and then you can hallucinate. That means in the process of upscaling, the image is changing, and an egg on a table can become a skull or a football. And that has a certain beauty to it to play around with those technologies. which upscale is your current favorite and if you have any new to five apps that you want to throw out there as your favorites i'll take them too um i'm still trying to find the right new defy app because the one that i'm using right now thinks that what i'm requesting is against the guidelines and it's just simple things that you would like to have an elephant trunk coming out of the floor yeah um that is too much i don't know why so i'm still trying to find a very unrestricted uh nudify app but with upscalers there are some upscalers that do a very good job without hallucinating and that is upscale or a gigapixel ai and then you have some like Crea or Magnific where you can add prompts and you can decide how wild the AI can go in upscaling.

41:05That's awesome. I can't imagine why a Nudify app wouldn't allow you to put an elephant trunk coming out of the floor, but we'll pull some strings for you. We'll do what we can. Thank you so much, Boris. Really, really appreciate it. Well, my pleasure. Thanks for reaching out. We wish you all the best and we look forward to sharing your wisdom and experience with our audience. Thank you. I'll put it to you first, Henrik. What did you take away from that incredible conversation with that marvelous artist? I mean, once again, I'm just blown away by people who have not been in the industry for very long and suddenly the expert, right?

41:41Like this guy, Boris, has been working with him for two years. And then you make the headline news because he's the one who's pushing the envelope in a photography competition. And I'm just constantly both amazed, but also kind of like inspired by the fact that here's an industry that once again is established not very long ago and where people who are curious and kind of exploratively with the technology very fast becomes the expert. And so in many ways it's inspiring because I feel in the internet days, you can kind of, you couldn't catch up being an expert a few years ago. Now you seem that you can catch up being an expert just by kind of starting to use the technology as it is today.