Contest 03/2023: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Create a SP-Studio picture about AI (= Artifical Intelligence). This is a hot topic at the moment, so I am sure everybody will find some inspiration.

For example you could create a picture about AI generated images (Midjourney) or text (Chat GPT). How will this new technology change our society? Or you can create a fun picture about how an AI could look like if it had a body. You can also recreate scenes from famous novels, movies or tv shows featuring AI (Terminator, Ex Machina, 2001, Star Trek,…).

Please remember: You are only allowed to use the SP-Studio, so do not edit with additional software (no cutting, drawing or filters). Don’t resize your picture to less than 300×300 px. Of course it must be your own creation.

The rules are as always:

1. CREATE a SP-Studio picture about the topic of the month
   
2. UPLOAD your unedited picture until the 20th
   
3. VOTING will start on the 21st on the contest page
   
4. THE WINNERS will be announced at the start of next month

You have one more week to upload your contest picture and the numbers already are amazing!

38 pictures have been accepted so far.

Lars helped me to include some internal links in the SP-Studio, so during the next days I want to promote the contest in the SP-Studio as well.

On the downside already 90 (!) pictures did not fit the topic at all and I had to delete them. Since there are many new visitors from TikTok I replied to most of them with some tips on how to enter the contest correctly. But none of them replied. I am not sure if they just don't read at all or if the topic is too complicated for them to come up with an idea. I mean... any cyborg or robot would count, no matter if it's from a movie or made up. So I thought it would be fun.

If you have easy ideas for the next contest topics feel free to share them. Maybe I should recycle the old "Disney" contest? Because everybody should understand this one and be able to come up with a character they like.

About 60% of the current visitors come from the USA, UK and Canada. Next are countries from Central and South America.

I guess it could be possible that young kids from Brazil or the Philippines have problems understanding the contest instructions in English. They all write their descriptions in English though... and I'd think it's enough to understand "topic" and "Artificial Intelligence". But for the next contest I will try to make it easier to understand. Perhaps it's still too much text on the contest page.

While the SP-Studio itself has support for different languages the rest of the website is just in English because I update it often. I could add a German translation, but I don't speak Spanish or Portuguese.

Good news, during the last 24 hours I got more fitting pictures. I guess it helped a bit to shorten the text on the contets page and to make it look better on mobile devices.

70 pictures so far! Only 3 days left for more uploads.

The vote has started!

I am testing a better voting tool but still need to improve the embedded view a bit. So here are two links for you:

You can use the embedded poll on the SP-Studio website: https://www.sp-studio.de/w/contests

Or you can use the direct link (it might fit the browser window better): https://pollunit.com/polls/sp-studio-contest-2023-03

There is a new feature: You can now write comments. Scroll down to write a general comment about the contest... Or you can comment on a specific picture. Oh and if you notice a picture that does not fit the rules please do not use the report icon. Report it directly to me instead. The same goes for any errors with the vote itself.

Now have fun scrolling through all of these great pictures!

It depends on the topic. With Star Wars, Marvel or Harry Potter we'd have a clear group of favourite characters which would appear often. But Disney is such a wide field with hundrets of beloved characters - I am sure we will see enough variety here. But I can have a look at the old submissions if I find them, since we had this topic before.

What I notice now: It shows that most of the new visitors are kids between 10 and 16. Movies and games they know tend to be rated very high, while it seems like many of them just don't know what Hal is supposed to look like. I mean... they like well make pictures, not just random ones. But it feels a bit unfair to those who did an amazing job with a picture that's just not part of a popular fandom among this generation. A contest topic like "Disney" would give everybody the same starting point.

I think I will try Disney first because of the new mass of young users. It's a limited world, everybody knows it and there are many different characters for every taste to choose from. This will be good to test the new contest situation.

Memes or Internet would be a good topic for after this.

While we already had Theater and Musical contests I think it's okay to repeat contests after many years. But I am afraid this is not a good topic at the moment because of the huge amount of new, young fans... let them settle in first and give them some topics they can better relate to. Just for a couple of months. I hope more of them leatn to appreciate which pictures are more skillful than others. It would be sad to see good opera pictures loose just because most kids do not care about opera at that age.

Congratulations to the winners!

This was a huge contest with 81 participants and 179 voters. Every picture received at least 1 point and the top picture got 45.

The new voting tool seemed to work very well - or did you encounter any problems? Next time I will try the upload function. I am not sure yet if I should keep the setting that you need to enter a name for voting. It helped me catch two double voters this time. But of course anonymous votes are also possible.

Here is a longer list of the top rated pictures:

I know pictures like the Ro-Butters would not be as highly rated by most of us because it is not an especially creative use of the possibilities of the SP-Studio... while others might be a bit sad now because they put a lot of time into their picture and didn't even made it close to the top5. We had a huge amount of new visitors this month and considering this things could have been worse. The visitor numbers are already getting lower and with time the remaining will get to know the SP-Studio items and recognize if they were used in a skillful way. So I am sure things will get better again. For now let's be happy about the many new faces.

In the past only forum members could vote, but I had to change this because the forum became less popular. Even at the moment there are not enough active members. I could force a registration on the contest page - but would it really help? A Jury would be the only solution to avoid "uneducated" votes.

This month every voter had to enter their name and cookies were used to avoid entering twice. The voting tool also has a special anti cheat controll. I checked how different people voted and could see no sign for cheating. For example when somebody tells their friends to vote for their picture usually only this picture gets a couple of votes during a close timeframe. This did not happen here.

I assume the reason for the +20 votes simply lies in the huge amount of new users from TikTok. They are young - between 10 and 16 years old. So they know Doki Doki Literature Club or Baymax better than a movie like 2001. This would explain the high position of modern animated characters in general. And (apart from Butters) these characters were at least edited slightly. Not as much as other pictures, but I think it is difficult for these new users to tell the difference yet, because most likely they don't even know all the items yet. But I feel like they tried to vote fair as best as they could.