The Maryland State Fair's photography competition will disqualify AI-modified entries from next year. The change follows a public backlash after Guy Alston won the "Neon Lights" category with a picture heavily reworked using AI.
The Baltimore Sun reported the dispute, which spread through a popular Reddit thread. Alston says he began with one of his own older photos and changed it with Google's Nano Banana inside Photoshop, plus other software. His view is that the category invited embellishment, and that AI already runs through ordinary editing tools anyway.
Competition superintendent Sam Chamelin said the special categories have allowed heavier digital work for about ten years and this year's rules didn't ban AI. He also said volunteers can't tell how each of roughly 850 entries was made. The fair still wants creative digital art, he said, but made by people rather than machines.
PetaPixel sees this as part of a wider problem for competitions trying to separate normal editing from generative AI. It recalls the earlier Colorado State Fair case, where a text-to-image entry won a fine-art prize and angered artists.
Sources · 1