20 years of Hommingberg cheetah trout: Bring your fish! | heise online
To mark the anniversary of its competition for a mysterious trout species, c't is launching a new contest: This time it's about AI-created images. Which techniques work to rank well in the search results of Google & Co. A good 20 years ago, we at the c't editorial team thought that a competition could be organized. The task: to place websites among the top search engine results for a specific search term. However, such a competition could push long-established websites and online stores out of the search engines' hit lists. Naturally, we wanted to avoid this kind of damage. So we chose a term that didn't exist on the web or anywhere else: “Hommingberger Gepardenforelle”. Roughly speaking, this is the idea behind an experiment that started exactly 20 years ago today and quickly gained momentum. Shortly after April 16, 2005, the internet was already teeming with imaginative posts about the Hommingberg cheetah trout. Blogs and newly registered websites reported on alleged sightings. Photomontages and even “historical” evidence of the exotic trout circulated. At times, Google counted far more hits for “Hommingberg cheetah trout” than for the much more generic “trout”. Spiegel Online praised the cheetah trout with a wink as the “most successful fish in the world”. In any case, the online community had a lot of fun with their new favorite mythical creature, which also got its Wikipedia entry. Today, far fewer Hommingberg cheetah trout wriggle through the net. Nevertheless, they still pop up from time to time, for example as an illustrative example of media literacy on the Austrian site KiJuKU for children and young people. Not so long ago, we ourselves used the Hommingberg cheetah trout to test the media competence of language models. A language model promptly tried to sell us the fictitious fish as real.
Time for a New Contest
We could go into much more detail here about the competition from twenty years ago. But on the one hand, our colleagues have already done so. For another, we wanted to celebrate the anniversary differently: with a new competition! This time, however, it's not about search engines. Frankly, we wouldn't even know how to design a new edition of – at a time when TikTok also needs to be considered because young people are searching there and search engines are changing significantly with AI. However, the new competition is about AI. The term “Hommingberg cheetah trout” is crying out to be processed in the form of AI-generated images in times of Stable Diffusion, Dall-E and the like. Our pitiful attempts, which illustrate this article, show that it's not that easy. There's more to it! So, mid-journey jockeys and Firefly aficionados: Flood your image machines with prompts and let the servers glow! In order not to restrict your creativity, we have deliberately given you only the original term “Hommingberg cheetah trout” as a task. Whether you let them jump through a hoop in a photorealistic zoo or scurry around in Keith Haring style is entirely up to you.
Join the Competition
The competition runs for a week from today and ends at midnight on April 23-24. To submit your pictures, you need a free account for the c't-Fotografie photo gallery. This also applies if you want to rate the pictures. You do not need an account to view the submissions without voting. So that we can assign your entries to the competition, you should definitely use the word “cheetah trout” in the picture title. We would be pleased if you could include the image generator used and the prompt. All registered users of the gallery are eligible to participate. The three best-placed images will each win a one-year heise+ account. In addition, the editorial teams of c't and c't Fotografie will publish the selected images in their magazines. Click here for the photo gallery of c't Fotografie.
(Image: Midjourney-generiert von c't)
(Note: This article was originally published in German. It was translated with technical assistance and editorially reviewed before publication.)
