Jason Allen lives in Colorado and sparked a long-running debate last week.He uses his AI software to create art and Colorado State Fair Fine Art (opens in new tab) Participated in a contest and won the first prize. Needless to say, some people don’t like this idea.
There are some important facts to note. Believing his submission was due to “Jason Allen via mid-journey,” Allen acknowledged to some extent what he did, spending a good deal of time prompting him to produce the final artwork. “For weeks.”
But of course this is the next nuance of the central question. It’s clear that the AI artbots only beat the human artists and could have fooled the human judges as well.
in the middle (opens in new tab) One of many AI image generation tools out there, currently in beta. When the user enters a text prompt, the software generates an image based on the associations within it. This means that there is an element of human dexterity in what it produces, as different combinations of a particular language can produce a wide range of results. , but it’s still basically a human-operated tool. As the old computer adage puts trash in means trash out.
Allen’s image is certainly not garbage. It’s beautiful. His winning work, called “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial,” won an award in the Digital Art category at the State Fair. Printed on canvas, it depicts a crowd of figures looking out from a dark room into a sunny sci-fi landscape.
Following the win, Allen posted about it on Discord. The post quickly picked up and went viral on Twitter. The event was announced on TL. DR’s “Somebody entered an art competition with her AI-generated work and won first prize. Yeah, that’s pretty shit.”
TL;DR — Someone entered an art competition with an AI-generated work and won first prize. pic.twitter.com/vjn1IdJcsLAugust 30, 2022
Luckily for Allen, he seems like the smart type of guy who doesn’t use Twitter. and its impact both in terms of cost of work and impact on cultural production. There’s also the fact that these things are trained based on human work. They have neither credit nor profit.
Then there are the most obvious boundaries. AI image generation software exists and will not go away. But should it compete with humans?
“I’m not going to apologize for that” Allen told the New York Times“I won, and I didn’t break any rules.”
A spokesperson for the Colorado Department of Agriculture told The Times that Allen clarified the use of mid-journey in his submission, so it’s certainly within the rules. He added that although he didn’t know what Midjourney was at the time, he would still have awarded Allen’s work.
Ultimately, Allen believes an awards ceremony like this will spawn an “AI category,” which seems like a sane solution to a very heated debate. and feels like it’s about to tweak some critics’ noses.
“Ethics is not in technology,” Allen told The Times. “It’s in people. This won’t stop. Art is dead, dude. It’s over. AI won.” The humans lost.”
While this is an obvious provocation, it also draws us into the thorny and unanswered question of what counts as art and which methods of making art are ‘valid’. The problem is not: Many historical examples, such as Duchamp’s urinal, Pollock’s paint splashes, Warhol’s and Hurst’s assistant production lines, have prompted the same considerations over the years, but the camera I don’t care about technology such as factory molding. Or the logistics and process of going into public art.
Ultimately it comes down to disclosure and final results. After all, no one really knows what art is, but we know it when we see it.
