Competitions

On Monday 22 June 2026, South Manchester Camera Club will hold a special competition judged by ChatGPT.

This will be an experimental (and hopefully fun) evening, giving members the chance to see how well AI performs in the role of a photographic judge, and to compare the experience with our usual human judging.

The competition will have three categories:

• Open
• Nature
• Theme: Contrast

There will be no print section, as ChatGPT is currently only able to assess digital images and cannot judge the physical qualities of a print.

Each member may enter up to two images via the website in the usual way, with a maximum of one image per category.

The competition will be run on the night using the usual competition software. The images will be judged in advance by ChatGPT, and its comments and scores will be read out as each image is displayed.

Images will be scored out of 20 as usual, with a minimum score of 12 and a maximum score of 20. ChatGPT may award more than one score of 20, but there will be only one overall winner in each category. Feedback will be limited to around one minute per image and will consider the image as a whole before commenting on details such as technical quality, storytelling, pictorial/visual impact, emotional effect, and originality.

After the judging, there will be time for members to discuss the experience and share their thoughts on how useful, fair, insightful, or limited they found the AI judging process.

Please note that this is very much a one-off special competition. The results will not count towards the final scores used to determine the annual awards. Please use new images in this competition; you can reuse the same images in later club competitions.