The Photographic Alliance of Great Britain
Guidance
‘Artificial Intelligence’ in Photography
This guidance amplifies the General Conditions for PAGB Events. It applies directly to all images submitted to PAGB events.
This guidance may be adopted by others including Federations and Clubs or may be modified for their own use in any way at their discretion.
How an individual creates an image for their own use, and what source material is coopted for image creation, is entirely at the individual’s discretion. But, when an image is submitted alongside the images of others into a competition or exhibition, then each participant needs to be assured that the other participants are using only their own original work. The PAGB sets out to give that assurance within its General Conditions (box).
Images must be entirely the work of the Photographer. In composite images, all component images must meet this requirement. For the avoidance of doubt, use of images from any other source including, but not limited to, royalty free image banks and clipart are not permitted.
There is a distinction between the image content, which is controlled by the General Conditions, and image processing and presentation which is at the photographer’s discretion. Processing can utilise techniques such as selection, noise reduction, calculated textures, montage, HDR, focus stacking and many others. Presentation may include keylines, print paper types, print mounting and others.
Photographers who enter PAGB events with images which do not meet the General Conditions are liable to sanctions under the PAGB Breach of Rules Procedure. The Breach of Rules Procedure may also apply to other events such as those with PAGB Patronage.
There are now many image processing methods available in camera, or in processing software or in plug-ins for such software, which have been refined or trained by their developers using the characteristics of many images. The list of methods is extremely long with examples such as face-detection focussing, raw conversion, monochrome conversion, noise reduction, focus stacking, HDR, panorama stitching and many more.
To the extent that these processes are applied only to the photographer’s original image, or to all the photographer’s original images in a composite, then they comply with the PAGB General Condition.
Image Generation
Banks of individual textures and skies have been available for some time and there are software systems which will overlay an imported texture or substitute a sky.
Increasingly there are image generator systems which draw on, or have been developed or trained on, content from large image banks to create new images, via a user prompt or specification.
Any importation, whether manual or automated, of all or part of a single image or of a generated image which includes or has been developed from the work of others, means that the resulting image content is not entirely the work of the photographer. The resulting image then does not comply with the PAGB General Conditions and is not permitted where those conditions apply.
It is appreciated that the individual photographer may not be fully aware of exactly how individual processing functions act, whether in-camera or in post-processing, However, the PAGB would expect photographers to be aware of when any significant addition has been made to an image which is not part of an original work by the photographer.
