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Comment by geraneum | Hacker News Reader

In the do stuff with you hand competition, using a shovel is cheating and in a walking contest, using a car is cheating. Very simple concept.

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But a photography contest is not a “take a picture with your camera” contest. Post processing dictates a decent portion of “photography” and it seems like the rules for this processing are a bit of a grey area. I personally hate where it has gotten to, as a photographer, but just pointing out my observations in the assessment.

> But a photography contest is not a “take a picture with your camera” contest.

Of course it is! You post process a picture you took with your camera. As a photographer, can you open paint/photoshop and create a picture out of nothing and submit it to this contest without it being considered cheating?

That's not what appears to have happened. It seems that AI was used as part of the post processing step.

It made up important details. That is why it was disqualified, AI or not.

Cheating is an emergent high order effect, not some ground rule of the universe. When 'cheating' becomes good enough it's just the cost of entry. Just look at the Olympics these days. A huge number of the people involved in different fields of it are doing all kinds of questionable medical procedures that are difficult to near impossible to detect at the time of competition.

Wouldn't be surprised if in a few decades that we have to X-ray the participants in hand competitions for robotic enhancements.

You can rationalize anything if you ignore your responsibilities to other people. Ultimately that’s just a long way around to being a crappy person.

just a meta comment about the comment you replied to.

I am consistently surprised by the levels of self-righteous hubris in the techbro community. People rationalising horrible behaviour and perpetuating the tragedy of the commons, just with computers.

I'm old enough for nostalgia so i regularly find myself pining for the days when the software industry was smaller and the nerds arena was not taken over by the MBA types and temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

It's worth remembering that for all of its strengths, this place is also first and foremost a forum for people chasing VC money and support. Name aside that is the essential draw, and that's why it's so much bigger and more active than alternative sites or more specialized technical communities. In my experience those smaller, more... well places with higher standards for actual technical knowledge tend to be a lot less tolerant of the MBA poseurs and the LessWrong/SlateStar/EA/etc cults.

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