Artwork created by artificial intelligence (AI) was awarded a first-place blue ribbon and a $300 prize for winning the digital category at the Colorado State Fair Fine Arts Competition. However, human creators are outraged by the news, with one stating that the world is “watching the death of artistry unfold.”
The AI artwork, titled Théatre D’opéra Spatial, was contributed by Jason Allen, the president of the Pueblo, Colorado-based gaming firm Incarnate Games. According to Allen, he used Mid journey to create breathtaking sceneries that appear to merge medieval and futuristic elements.
The AI program Mid journey generates images from textual descriptions.
Allen announced his victory on Discord, an instant messaging social platform where he is known as Sincarnate. The news then spread to Twitter, where users expressed their displeasure that artwork generated by AI was selected over those created by a human, with one user exclaiming, “That’s pretty f*cking crap.”
Allen observes on Discord that Twitter users who are against AI-generated art are also ‘the first to throw the human part under the bus by denigrating the human element.’
PCMagazine states that a representative for the Colorado State Fair stated that the judges were unaware that the artwork was created by an artificial intelligence system.
The individual added, however, that there are currently no restrictions prohibiting the use of artificial intelligence to make digital art.
Allen’s Discord post says that he used Mid journey to produce ‘hundreds of photographs’ before selecting the top three, which he then printed on canvas using Gigapixel A, a technology that improves the resolution and detail of digital images.
A Twitter user with the handle OmniMorpho tweeted, “We are witnessing the demise of creativity.”
If creative jobs are vulnerable to automation, then even high-skilled jobs are in jeopardy of extinction. What will we then have?
Allen, on the other hand, was aware that the victory ‘would be controversial,’ as he stated on Discord, adding that AI-generated art will eventually receive its category.
‘What if we looked at it from the other extreme?’ he said on Discord. ‘What if an artist created a work while hanging upside down and being whipped while painting?’
Should this artist’s work be regarded differently than that of a different artist who created the identical thing “normally”? I assume that, in the end, they will simply create a category called ‘art created by artificial intelligence for works such as this.
AI-generated art is not a novel idea, but it is gaining popularity. It enables creators to construct imaginative situations by providing precise instructions to the machine.
However, technology has progressed over time; more than five years ago, systems could only conjure nightmare blobs, whereas now they can build epic, complex scenes.
In July, a TikToker asked Mid journey to design what it believes would be the final selfie ever taken.
The system displayed images of humans taking pictures of themselves with melting skin, blood-smeared faces, and altered bodies while standing in front of a burning planet.
