Jeopardizing Reality: AI (Mis)judges History's Most Iconic Photos

NEW YORK - July 2, 2025 - PRLog -- One year ago, art activist Miles Astray's FLAMINGONE stunt—a real photo winning two AI awards—went viral. Now Astray broke the rules of another contest to show how AI erodes our reality.

German software developer PRC (Pattern Recognition Company) had let its Excire photo software's AI be the judge of an international contest with the theme "People in Focus." According to its parent company, the AI judge is one that has "no personal preferences or tendencies bias its judgment." Participants received an instant ranking of their entry with the top 20 publicly visible on the contest's website.

"Curious to see how my photos would fare with, it became clear from the leaderboard that my candid work would stand no chance against hyper-stylized, ultra-staged, mega-stereotyped imagery that was characteristic of the Top 20," says Astray. "The results spoke a clear visual language and hinted at a future where natural and authentic photographs are drowned by a flood of generic and artificial imagery fast becoming the biased norm."

Realizing that his own imagery was not enough to make the case, Astray decided to enter 20 of history's most iconic and critically-acclaimed images to prove that they would fail to impress the AI judge. The exact results have been published on Astray's website (https://www.milesastray.com/news-july-2025).

Promoting its photo software with the contest, PRC describes it as a tool to "help individuals, businesses, and public authorities around the world to intelligently organize, search, and analyze large image collections" and to "quickly find and select the best images." According to Astray, "the winning images show what 'best' means, and reveal that the machine is indeed heavily biased towards Caucasians and exoticized rest-of-the-worldlers forced into a stereotypical mold and imprisoned in the most commonly photographed places and set-ups, painted—almost literally—with a purely artificial aesthetic that favors overcooked post-production flavors."

Astray claims that humanity's visual library is already heavily biased and generic as it is. AIs are being trained on that content, so these aesthetics become encoded in LLM algorithms, leading to outputs that mirror the training data. "This leads to an erosion of reality, making it increasingly impossible to find real images of real people and real moments in real places."

"We're currently ignoring the severe long-term risks of AI—from disinformation to the erosion of democracies and reality as we know it—while jumping on short-term benefits that are mostly lazy conveniences at this point," says Astray.

You can find more information, imagery, and videos here (https://www.milesastray.com/news-july-2025):