Your opening paragraph is deeply misleading. He rejected the prize because the image was not a photograph. What he revealed was what you are attempting to do here: to conflate two different processes. He exposed the need to educate those who don’t know the difference. Photography was not “overturned by a tornado,” only the decision of “expert” judges who should have known better and disqualified the image.

The series of images you are fawning over may be interesting but they are not photography and don’t belong in something claiming to be a photography exhibition.

There is much that needs to be said about overprocessing of photographs, but attempting to equate the inescapable errors of AI-generated imagery with overprocessed photography is an attempt to equate the two processes to justify the crap you wrote about addressing the “elephant in the room.”

This is the elephant in the room: The two differing processes do not produce the same product. One produces photographs; the other produces illustrations. Your scurrilous attempt to equate the two by disregarding the effort required by photography matters because it records and reconstitutes an actual unique and real event, even if staged, that occurred at a specific place, at a specific time, from a specific and intended perspective. The other never can. Period.

You can play with all the AI-generative toys—and I don’t care if you do— but the images produced can never be photographs because they were not created by a photographic process. Therefore, there are no such things as “AI-Generated Photo Exhibitions.” Period.

This conflation must stop.