(Paris) German artist Boris Eldagsen sparks controversy in the world of photography after being awarded at the Sony World Photography Awards with a work generated by artificial intelligence.

The jury initially accused the artist of “deliberately” misleading behavior, before recanting in a later statement.

Mr. Eldagsen had defended himself by claiming to have always been transparent about the nature of his work, but decided on Tuesday to refuse his reward.

In mid-March, Boris Eldagsen’s work – a sepia-toned image of two women named Pseudomnesia: The Electrician – won the Creative Award at the Sony World Photography Awards.

After explaining in interviews that he wanted to provoke a debate on the place of AI, Eldagsen said last week that “AI-generated images and photographs should not compete together in an award like this.” .

“I applied like a cheeky monkey, to see if the competitions were prepared for the arrival of these works. They are not,” he considers.

The jury told him that they had removed the work “in accordance with his wishes”, but that “in view of his actions and […] his deliberate attempts to mislead us”, he was “no longer able to engage in a constructive dialogue with him”.

Many photographers fear that artificial intelligence threatens their craft by allowing anyone to generate stunning images from descriptive text.

The very rapid development of image generators has already resulted in several lawsuits, as these tools are “trained” with huge databases of works found on the internet, and often copyrighted .

Already last year, the art world was wondering after an image generated by artificial intelligence won an award in Colorado.