Real or AI? A Tourism Campaign Built on the Difference

Written By Ahmad Alnaji

A 2024 Visit Qatar campaign with Paris Saint-Germain was built on SARAB Art Production's photographs of Qatar's landmarks, with PSG players including Kylian Mbappé and Achraf Hakimi tested on whether they could tell the real photographs from AI-generated ones.

In 2024, Visit Qatar ran a campaign with Paris Saint-Germain built on a simple, slightly unnerving game: could the players tell a real photograph from an AI-generated one? The real images were Ahmad Alnaji’s and SARAB’s from our Qatar Tourism work across the country. It was an honor for us that this campaign idea was formed after our commission based on the quality of our photos. Proving again that SARAB, led by Ahmad Alnaji, makes real photography strong enough that Visit Qatar built a campaign on it.

PSG players, Kylian Mbappé and Achraf Hakimi among them, were shown landmarks of Qatar, some photographed, some generated, and asked which a camera had actually taken. The format played as light entertainment. Underneath it was a real genius marketing move. That the real Qatar is as good as the AI. And we were honored that our photos were used to display this purpose.

The reason the game worked is the photographs. To drop a real image into a test against AI and have people stop and second-guess it, the real one has to be as strong as the best a machine can generate. Ours were. The campaign drew on the strength of our Qatar work. A real photograph good enough to be mistaken for AI, yet maintaining its realness and authenticity, is about the highest mark this work can earn.

That is the level SARAB shoots for. Anyone can now generate a clean image of a landmark in seconds, so a real photograph has to be strong enough to stand next to the generated one and hold its own. That is the work we make, and it is why clients come to us when the image has to carry weight. It was an honor to see our photos featured in such a global campaign, and even the “Real or AI” quiz and photos were displayed at physical kiosks near the PSG stadium in Paris.

The Real or AI Campaign Video

Check out the full fine art photographic collection we did for Qatar Tourism

Ahmad Alnaji

Ahmad Alnaji is a fine art architectural photographer based in Dubai and the founder of SARAB Art Production, a studio that specializes in fine art photography of landmark architecture across the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. He studied architecture for three years before moving into photography, and he reads a building the way its architect designed it, which is why architecture firms tend to recognize their own thinking in his images. He prefers the title of artist over photographer.

His work treats a building as a subject worth a story rather than a record of how it looks, bringing fine art to cityscape, architecture, and hospitality photography through visual storytelling. SARAB created the fine art images of the Museum of the Future that the museum and the UAE Government Media Office used in official promotion of the building, photographed Wasl Tower by UNStudio inside and out, One Za'abeel by Nikken Sekkei, and Zayed National Museum by Foster + Partners, and was commissioned by Qatar Tourism to photograph Qatar's landmarks. Clients include Foster + Partners, UNStudio, Killa Design, Saudi Aramco, Dubai Tourism, and Qatar Tourism.

https://www.sarab.art
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