Miles Astray

Miles Astray is a German-born, self-taught photographer and writer whose work — landscapes, street photography, and unusual animal encounters — grew out of a round-the-world journey begun in 2012. He was little known outside photo circles until 2024, when a single flamingo made him a global symbol of human creativity’s case against the machine.

F L A M I N G O N E

At dawn on a beach in Aruba, Astray had photographed a flamingo scratching itself with its beak, its head tucked so completely that it appeared headless — a ball of pink feathers on legs. Surreal enough to pass for a machine hallucination, the image was his answer to a wave of AI pictures winning photography prizes: he entered the untouched photograph in the AI category of the 1839 Awards. In June 2024 it won both third place from the jury and the People’s Vote award, and was disqualified once he revealed the truth — an outcome he said he expected and supported.

Astray wrote that he entered the photo to prove that human-made content has not lost its relevance, that nature and its human interpreters can still beat the machine, and that creativity and emotion are more than a string of digits. The organizers took it gracefully — director Lily Fierman said “we agree with Miles’ statement” — and the stunt became a mirror image of Boris Eldagsen’s AI image winning a photography prize the year before.