The works by Richard PoE, Billal El Harousse and Yi Han really struck a tone with me.

His post suggested that he had won the overall award, not a sub-category.

It's the same thing as the Loebner Prize 'victory'. You take a highly subpar AI output, and spin it as some sort of deliberately degraded output (such as a ESL child supposedly taking the Turing Test); humans charitably overlook the flaws and assume it's the style or medium; then you ding them on supposedly not noticing the flaws.

So this is photography not photoshop contest ?

...did they paint a dog to do that ? Or there is some half and half dog running around somewhere?

I would think there are enough dogs out there that half and half exists. But clearly a Photoshop contest.