catbox.moe might be fine as a host

strawpoll.com might be an alternative to upvotes, or even let judges do ranked voting

would anyone be interested in judging? We could also go by simple upvotes, although there are a lot of problems with this.

I wouldn't recommend using upvotes considering the fuckery that goes on with the voting here. My suggestion would to have 3 volunteers do the judging so it's tamper proof.

Catbox.moe keeps the metadata in PNG images so you could check prompts/model that way, and they also don't have extreme NSFW filters like imgur does now.

Thirding catbox.moe. I'd definitely participate if you did this. And yes, a fairly niche theme is recommended, to make the entries more comparable, and limiting the amount a mere difference in taste from the judges plays. Make it clear what the judges are looking for.

I don't know If I'd limit it to specific characters, but you should engineer the theme in such a way as to push people out of their typical habits when generating, make it complex enough that mastery over the generation tools is required, but broad enough to give space for ambition and skill to shine through to differentiate between works that meet the theme.

Restrict the size of the image, because otherwise it simply gives advantage to those with more tokens/processingpower/time. (or simply, max 1024x1024). I don't think the size needs to be more restrictive than that, personally. If you ask for a 3/4s shot of a 1girl, most people are going to default to 1:1, 2:3, 3:4, or 1:2.

I'd say to avoid "artstyle" in your categories, simply because that results in things looking very samey. On the one hand, things looking samey means its easier to determine a "winner", but on the other hand, it's more boring. Give an idea, and let people go wild. They want to run a pastel oil LORA or an Instagram LORA or a thin-line pencil sketch LORA? Go wild! More fun results that way.

To avoid this looking like you just ran out of tokens and are asking competent people who can run A1111 to make your own gens for you, I'd say the prompt would need to be either fairly vague but gaming-oriented, or otherwise be voted on by the community, or decided not by you, but by the judges.

Personal opinion: It should be handled a bit like a cooking competition show: Each judge gets to ask one component of the gen (be it a mandatory prompt, a mandatory LORA at a specific strength, a theme, or just a "feeling" they want in the gen), and then freestyle beyond that, to see what abominations people can whip up.

If the judging is just aesthetic based then I’ll do it, another alternative could be just doing post based voting

I'd suggest limiting the competition to a theme. For example "music" or "action scene". Something generic. Let the AI artists do their thing.

one way would be a requirement that only participants may vote for winners. there's problems here too, but it would at least prevent sock-puppeting.

edit: revisiting this post, because "prevention" is impposible, but I think a voting requirement that to vote you have to participate could help combat such devious tactics, especially with ranked voting as someone else pointed out.

maybe it should be a requirement to post the model and prompts. Possibly LoRA as well.

separate contests for pure and retouched photos

Two categories if you want, but at least in the "pure" one, I would support letting people use whatever tools they want, as long as they say what they did, so everyone could learn what's possible and how to do it. It's an interesting field, but it is changing pretty fast and it's easy to lose track of what's out there.

Is it limited to what the AI produces, or is photoshop alterations allowed?