First and foremost, we’d like to thank you for your feedback, even though we would have preferred a bit more constructiveness instead of cynicism here. Unfortunately, this thread highlights exactly the problem with the whole AI issue: it’s not always clearly recognizable. For some it’s crystal clear, for others it isn’t. You say it yourselves: “it feels off” and that’s the point, we simply can’t always prove it definitively, or even just mostly. And we don't want to exclude anyone based on a mere hunch. For us as the event team, it’s just as disappointing as it is for you that AI is being used in contests like this - please don’t get us wrong.
Your idea of requesting intermediate steps has already been put into practice at this event. However, since these intermediate steps can also be generated by an AI, that doesn’t make things any easier. For the future, we’ll keep in mind the possibility of recording the entire painting process and sending it via email.
We can assure you that we’ve run suspicious images through detection software and have already disqualified a large number of entries. But even the results from this detection software aren’t always accurate. We’ve even looked up some of the artists on social media to get a better sense of their work. Unfortunately, neither we nor the vast majority of the jury are experts in this field.
After all, we definitely want to continue making contests like this possible for the players. The alternative would be not to host this event at all - and that would be a pity. We’ll reconsider how to handle this in the future.
Additionally, we will not tolerate further accusations or public call-outs against other players/participants. This thread is now closed.
