An award-winning photo was disqualified from the AI category of a competition because it turned out to be real

Flamingone, a photo by Miles Astray depicting a flamingo bending its neck to hide its head beneath its body, won the People's Vote award and a bronze prize in the AI category of this year's 1839 Color Photography Contest ("Named after the year the medium was first made widely available to the public," according to its website). And then it was disqualified for being a real photo.

"I wanted to show that nature can still beat the machine and that there is still merit in real work from real creatives," the photographer told PetaPixel.