AI-generated picture wins art competition
“Théâtre D’opéra Spatial,” pictured above, won the top prize for digital art at the Colorado State Fair’s fine arts competition last week. Game designer Jason Allen created the piece in large part by using an artificially intelligent image generator—and some human artists are big mad about it.
How it was made: Allen created 900 image variations on the theme of “space opera theater” by feeding a text prompt into AI image generator Midjourney. He then edited his favorite creations in Adobe Photoshop (like editing in a head Midjourney forgot), and sharpened the quality using another machine-learning tool before printing them out on canvas.
One online skeptic said that Allen’s win is like “entering a marathon and driving a Lamborghini to the finish line.” But Allen argues that AI “is a tool, just like the paintbrush is a tool.” Fair spokesperson Olga Robak likened AI to photography, which “was not considered an art form for a long time; people said it was just pushing a button.”
Another critique of AI-generated art is that it constitutes plagiarism. Machine-learning tools, including Midjourney and DALL-E 2, rearrange elements scraped from millions of images across the web—meaning each image they generate is an algorithmic soup of countless human artists’ work.
For their part, the competition’s judges and even its third-place winner said they don’t have a problem with Allen’s piece.—JW