Artist named Jason M Allen from Colorado entered in the The Colorado State Fair’s annual art competition where they gave out prizes for three categories,painting,quilting,
A.I.generated art has been around for years. But tools released this year like DALL-E 2, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion have made it possible for anyone to create complex, abstract or photorealistic works simply by typing a few words into a text box.
Allen first learned about AI when he was invited to a discord chat server where they were testing the program MidJourney. Users type a series of words in a message to the AI and it spits back an image seconds later. After being fascinated with the idea and with this new found ability to make art, Allen got the idea to submit it to the Colorado state fair which had a division in “digital art/digitally manipulated photography”. He had a local print shop print the image on a canvas and submitted it.
He ended up winning the division and a $300 prize. Many people including other artists were upset, didn’t think it was fair and mentioned that it changed the idea about being an artist. Judges from the competition say that the piece followed the rules, nothing was kept hidden and while two of the judges didn’t know it was AI generated, it would have changed the decision either way. Allen urges artist to overcome their opinions on AI even is its a coping strategy and states “This isn’t going to stop,” Mr. Allen said. “Art is dead, dude. It’s over. A.I. won. Humans lost.”
Hi Chelsea!
I think your article does a great job of explaining this controversy impartially and providing the views of many different people involved in the event. I think it was interesting to hear about the judges’ perspective on Allen’s AI submission, as their easy acceptance of AI art was a bit surprising to me. However, I found Allen’s response to the backlash particularly shocking.
The idea that “art is dead” seems completely wild to me. Sure, generative AI has evolved and become so widely accessible that AI art likely isn’t going away, but that doesn’t mean human art is “dead.” AI can only make art because it is trained on works that were created by humans, if people stopped making art, the AI would have nothing left to learn from. Humans, on the other hand, create and learn from each other, but also from their own experiences. Art styles have been created and informed by the context that the artists live in forever—but AI doesn’t have that lived experience. I believe that if artists were to give up as Allen suggests they do, art would become stagnant—never evolving, and possibly even devolving if the AIs are only ever fed more AI art to learn from.
The end of the article is astonishing and frightening how Allen, the winner of the competition, fully believes that art is dead and artificial intelligence has taken over. I think that is a sad take to have and completely misses the target as to what art is. Art is expression, often of emotions, history, but human expression nonetheless. I empathize with the upset artists who do not agree with Allen winning the competition since all he did was type a few words as a prompt to a computer that made the art for him. The fact that an 8 year old could have typed a few words to artificial intelligence that could produce beautiful art is the reason Allen’s award can be seen as undeserved. I overall completely disagree that artificial intelligence can ever takeover art.
Hi Eddie!
You vocalized my thoughts exactly. I think, generally, people often have a hard time defining what is considered “art” and what isn’t — and I think that this gray area has allowed for a lot of this AI work to creep in through the cracks. Because people have trouble with what to label art, I think a lot of people take advantage of that and create this argument of “well if a random object can be art, why can’t this?”. But, I think your phrase “Art is expression, often of emotions, history, but human expression nonetheless”, perfectly rebuttes this claim, and truly echoes the sentiment of what art it. Art, no matter the medium, is constructed with a human hand, with emotion. When people put words into a AI generator, the computer doesn’t have that emotional factor — often leaving the work feeling “hollow” in a way. To contrast, Van Gogh’s paintings show his emotion, with his brushstrokes, color choices, etc. — we saw his perspective on the world. AI simply searches various sources and compiles something literal, with no hint of individuality.
Your post does a great job of explaining how Jason M. Allen’s win with AI-generated art is sparking controversy and making people rethink what it means to create. It’s interesting how transparent Allen was about using MidJourney, yet people still accuse him of cheating, which shows how unprepared a lot of us are to accept AI as part of the art world. I think you made a good point about how this challenges traditional ideas of creativity. The backlash makes sense because so many people see art as a deeply personal process, but at the same time, AI isn’t taking away creativity, I believe it’s just changing the tools we use. Just like photography or digital editing when they first came around, AI could end up being just another way to push boundaries and experiment. I also thought Allen’s comment about “art being dead” was kind of extreme, but it seems like he’s trying to make a point about how AI is here to stay. This whole situation really makes me wonder how competition and the art world as a whole are going to adapt. It’s not about whether AI belongs in art, it’s about how we’re going to define and value creativity moving forward.