AI wins State Fair Art competition, irritates people

A synthetic media artist named Jason Allen entered AI-generated artwork in the Colorado State Fair fine arts competition, announcing last week that he took first place in the Digital Arts/Digitally manipulated photography category, Vice reported Wednesday based on a survey. viral tweet.

Allen used Midjourney – a commercial image synthesis model available through a Discord server – to create a sequence of three images. He then scaled them up, printed them on canvas and submitted them for the competition at the beginning of August. To his delight, one of the images (titled Theater D’Opera Spatial) took the top prize and he posted about his win on the Midjourney Discord server on Friday.

Allen’s win sparked lively discussions on Twitter, Reddit, and the Midjourney Discord server about the nature of art and what it means to be an artist. Some commentators think that human artistry is doomed thanks to AI and that all artists are destined to become replaced by machines. Others think that art will evolve and adapt with new technologies that emerge, citing synthesizers in music. It’s a hot debate Wired covered in July.

There’s also the fairness element, as it’s not clear whether Allen told the jury about his use of image synthesis, although some Twitter users have Reportedly contacted the judges and found they didn’t know. Oddly enough, the art was considered good enough to fool human artists and anyone on Twitter joked that it has settled the debate on whether AI art is art.

It’s worth noting that the invention of the camera in the 1800s sparked similar criticism regarding the medium of photography, as the camera seemingly did all the work compared to an artist struggling to create a work of art by hand. make with a brush or pencil. Some feared that painters would be obsolete forever with the advent of color photography. In some applications, photography replaced the more labour-intensive methods of illustration (such as engraving), but today there are still human fine art painters.

Image synthesis tools in their current state require a high degree of human guidance and cherry picking to achieve remarkable results, but the field is evolving rapidly, and that may not always be the case. But as long as new artistic instruments emerge, the question is “Is it art?” debate will likely continue as long as there are people to have the discussion.