Boycotting Artists Rejoin 49-Work Brisbane Portrait Prize as AI Debate Persists
Updated
Updated · The Guardian · Sep 17
Boycotting Artists Rejoin 49-Work Brisbane Portrait Prize as AI Debate Persists
1 articles · Updated · The Guardian · Sep 17
Summary
Six First Nations artists represented by Birrunga’s gallery have returned to the Brisbane Portrait Prize after boycotting in 2024 and 2025 over its acceptance of AI-generated work.
Birrunga said they chose to “reinsert ourselves” rather than stay outside the contest, using self-portraits about “ancestral integrity” to set human cultural practice against software-generated imagery.
Photographer Glenn Hunt, who helped lead the 2024 boycott, also re-entered and is a finalist with a portrait of Dean Clifford, saying the work is the opposite of AI fakery.
Only 1 of the 49 main-competition finalists declared generative AI use this year, despite the prize’s 2024 decision to allow such works and its $50,000 top award remaining open to them.
BPP director Anna Reynolds said the issue has shifted from whether AI belongs in art to how it is used without copyright infringement and under human creative control.