Jeopardizing Reality: Art Activist's Livestreamed Stunt Unmasks the Truly False Colors of Our AI Future

Astray entered 20 of history's most iconic photos into a competition judged by an AI to reveal its biased and reality-eroding sense of aesthetics.

NEW YORK, July 2, 2025 - One year ago, art activist Miles Astray's F L A M I N G O N E stunt-a real photo winning two AI awards-went viral. Now Astray broke the rules of another contest to show how AI erodes reality as we know it.

While F L A M I N G O N E was "proof that mother nature and her human interpreters still beat the machine, it also magnified the ever-finer line between real and fake imagery," according to Astray. This year, German software developer PRC (Pattern Recognition Company) 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. Raw files of these winners were required to prove that no AI was involved in their making.

"Curious to see how my photos would fare with an allegedly impartial AI judge, 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 not subtly but glossily at a future where natural and authentic photographs are drowned by a flood of generic, artificial, and cosmeticized imagery fast becoming the biased norm."

Realizing that his own award-winning 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, demonstrating that historic pictures like Steve McCurry's Afghan Girl scored mediocre results at best without coming anywhere near the top 20.

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."

Explaining why this is problematic, Astray claims that humanity's visual library is already heavily biased and generic as it is. AIs are being trained on that content, so a generic sense of aesthetics becomes encoded in LLM algorithms, leading to outputs that mirror the training data. "It's a multiplier: artificial2, generic2, biased2. 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.

PRC claims that "Excire's AI [..] has already served as a juror in several prestigious photo contests," making the results "questionable" according to Astray.

You can find more information, imagery, and videos here: www.milesastray.com/news

Miles Astray
634 Prince Arthur Ouest
Montreal, QC H2X 1T8
Canada

Miles Astray is a multidisciplinary art activist, combining writing and photography inspired by a slow and immersive journey around the world that started in 2012.

This release was published on openPR.