I don’t understand the frustration. With all of the recent examples of people winning photo contests only to reveal later that their “photos” were made by AI, it’s only natural that judges grow paranoid of these things.
As for your friend’s comment on photo competitions, that sounds like someone who’s butt hurt for not winning. I enter some photo contests ocasionally and I have yet to see one in which the winner hadn’t produced some pretty decent work.
For photography, the biggest one (in terms of subscribers at least) I’ve found so far is @photography , if anyone’s interested.
If anyone has recommendations for other photography spaces hit me up.
While I understand the sentiment, I hate this trend that whenever someones talks about how soulless the internet has become, the answer is always Web 1.0.
I don’t want web 1.0. I like having CSS and Javascript around. I use them to build things I couldn’t with HTML alone, and I’ve seen countless incredibly creative websites which fundamentally couldn’t have been built without Javascript. It’s weird to me how the article mentions the creative aspect of the old web, versus the commercial aspect and “sameyness” of the current web, only to then toss out tools that allow for even more creativity and personalization in the current web.
Whenever I finish reading one of these articles it always feels like it’s mostly nostalgia and not much else.