Photography contests typically feature a panel of professional photographers and curators as judges, but a new photography contest by a software company is being judged entirely by artificial intelligence.
The Excire People in Focus contest awards $7,000 (about £5,169 / AU$10,797) in total prizes, but the contest is being judged entirely by Excire’s AI model.
Unlike a traditional photography contest, entrants will be able to immediately see how their photo ranks as the AI judges rate submissions as they come in.
Excire’s AI model judges images in a similar way to how the AI is used to help photographers organize photo libraries in programs like Excire Foto and the Lightroom plugin Excire Search.
The contest, which welcomes any photographs that depict people, does not accept AI-generated graphics, and entrants whose images make it through to the top 20 will be required to submit the original, unedited file.
Members of the public have, in the past, submitted AI-generations to photography contests and entered photographs to AI contests, in order to start a discussion around AI and art. Excire is looking to do the same with the contest and spark conversations around AI’s place in photography.
In an email to Digital Camera World, Excire explained: “We’re not suggesting that AI can replace subjective human taste. Rather, our goal is to generate discussion around photography and AI – and have some fun, too!”
The marketing stunt shows off the photo software’s AI while also introducing two key factors that the company says stem from being judged by AI.
The first is near-instant ranking of submitted images, with the contest’s top 20 ranking being updated as new images are submitted. The second is an AI judge that’s consistent and unbiased, the company claims.
While contest rules exclude AI entries from winning prizes, I’ve already spotted at least one likely AI generation among the current top 20.
The image is either a good AI generation or a terrible edit, with overly saturated colors and unnaturally smooth skin. When I plugged it into an AI detection software, the program suggested that it was 99 percent likely to be AI-generated.
Excire describes the contest as being judged "entirely" by the company's AI, but there are a few requirements that will presumably be vetted by humans. The originals that the top 20 photographers are expected to submit within 24 hours will take some time and human intervention to sift through, and remove likely AI generations from the contest results.
Hopefully, whatever humans are working on the photo contest will be better able to spot the fakes.
While the company says the contest is less biased than human judges, AI software is trained to rank certain features above others.
Looking at two startlingly similar images in the top five – with photographers’ names that are close enough they could be the same person trying to skirt the one-entry-per-day rules – offers some hints into what the program is looking for. (One of the two images has since been removed from the results.)
Out of the two similar images, the image that is edited with more saturation, more sharpness and deeper blacks ranks higher than the lighter edit. Personally, I think the higher-ranked image was over-edited. Looking at the current top 20, it feels like the AI does like deep blacks and plenty of contrast.
While I do hope the contest has some human oversight, and the rule-breaking images soon disappear from the top 20, the contest is likely to spark some conversations that need to be had. Modern artists need to decide what place, if any, AI has in their work, and that includes whether or not we give AI a say in what makes a photograph "good".
Though the company says the AI contest is consistent and less biased than human judging, AI is human-trained and not immune to biases either. Early AI software was demonstrated to have racial and gender biases, and recent studies suggest that this bias still exists.
The contest will award the first-place winner with $4,000 (about £2,952 / AU$6,164), second place with $2,000 (about £1,476 / AU$3,082), and third place with $1,000 (about £738 / AU$1,541).
The Excire People in Focus competition is open until June 30 2025, with entries uploaded to the official contest website.
Participants are allowed to submit up to one image per day, with no entry fee. Images that are AI-generated or that do not depict people are ineligible for the contest. Images that place in the top 20 will be required to submit an original, unedited photograph within 24 hours to vet the image’s authenticity.
The company says that the images uploaded for the contest will not be used for training AI.
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Can you spot an AI-generated photo? Read these five ways to spot an AI fake. Or, read our Excire Foto review or browse the best photo organizing software.
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