An AI-altered photo of a ram won a Maryland State Fair contest, sparking outcry

The ram is cybernetic, robotic and electric. He was photographed a few years ago at an agricultural fair before the picture was altered using Google Gemini’s Nano Banana, an artificial intelligence image generator and photo editor.

That image won first place in the Maryland State Fair’s photography contest, in the “Neon Lights” category, which allowed pictures to be “embellished.”

“The R.A.M.” has sparked an online outcry, with users on the r/Maryland subreddit criticizing the fair for allowing the image into the contest. Officials acknowledged that it was a wake-up call and said it prompted new rules addressing generative AI use in their contests. The state fair runs through Sunday.

Guy Alston, the photographer, thinks people online are overthinking.

“Reactions to things should be in an order of magnitude to the thing. It’s a picture in a state fair, in an amateur group. It won $11,” he said. “Art is opinions. Nothing more, nothing less. Either you like it, or you don’t.”

The contest has 40 categories ranging from photos of landscapes to photos of birds, in both color and black and white. It specifically regulates Photoshop use. “Less is more,” the rules say.

The competition also includes two “special contest” categories that change every year. This year, one category, “Hope for America,” asked entrants to think of “inspiration” for the next 250 years. The other category, “Neon Lights,” allowed photographs to be “embellished.” The rules didn’t specify what that meant.

“We do encourage a little more playfulness and perhaps some artistic flair,” said Sam Chamelin, who administers the contest. The idea, he said, was to allow photographers to use Photoshop more creatively than they would for other contest categories.

Chamelin acknowledged that “The R.A.M.” leaned more toward digital art than photography.

When he received the submission, he said he didn’t have evidence that it was AI-generated. All he knew was that the image had been “embellished” from a photograph taken at some other Maryland agricultural fair. He learned after the competition that the photographer had used Nano Banana to alter the original photograph.

“At that point, we had started having conversations like, ‘One day we’re gonna have to deal with AI,’” said Chamelin, who sets the rules for the photography section, receives the entries, and ensures that the contest runs smoothly. “It snuck up on us faster than we thought.”

He felt that the image fit this year’s guidelines. Chamelin said he stood by the judges’ decision.

Alston, 61, from Randallstown, started in photography about eight years ago as part of “creative coping” after his wife died. He slowly entered local competitions with some of his pictures. It’s always been a casual hobby, he said.

“I love photography. It’s gotten me through some very rough times,” he said.

He said he was sorry folks were upset about the picture and that he was surprised it won.

“To be at the center of any type of discussion, I guess from an artist’s point of view, I actually want to provoke conversation,” he said.

Historically, he added, photographers have used the darkroom or Photoshop to make certain improvements. AI is nothing new, he said.

“I took a picture, and I altered it for a particular category to get a particular look and it won,” he said. “It resonated with the person that saw it.”

Critics online took issue with the idea that judges would have considered it a photograph in the first place.

Will Varner, 30, saw the image after a friend shared the Reddit post in a group chat. “Anyone who has been on the internet at all over the past year at least can see that and understand that [it is AI],” he said, adding that while he laughed about it, it bummed him out.

“We all know that this is absurd, but we all are also very sad because this is being recognized as something that it’s not,” he said. Varner found himself thinking about the other photographers who entered their work in this competition, only to see that an image that used AI won.

“It’s demoralizing that we even got to this,” he said.

Sami Hunter, 39, a photographer and lead singer of a local Baltimore band, also said she felt disheartened by this year’s win.

“When you are running something through a learning model, and you are completely removing the original spirit of the photo, that is when it moves away from being photography to being a generated image,” she said.

“I don’t even know how it ever got considered as an entry,” said Rob Glass, 36, a hobby photographer in Baltimore. “It’s so very, very clearly AI.”

Glass said he tries to go to the Maryland State Fair every other year to see what gets entered in the contests.

“It’s just a cool way to display local art of all sorts,” he said. “You’re not winning a bunch of prize money. It’s not going to get you famous or anything.”

Glass said he wanted to submit some of his cityscape photographs to the contest, but missed the deadline and felt discouraged by the cost of printing and mounting his images compared to what he stood to win. Prize money for the general photo entries ranges from $7 for first place to $4 for fourth. First place in the special “Neon Lights” category paid $11.

That’s why he doesn’t understand why the state fair would allow AI.

“It kind of kills the integrity of it because this is not some sort of high-stakes competition,” he said. “If there’s a chance that some AI is going to win, why am I going to enter this?”