AI Art wins Competition, Artists are upset

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,sculpture. Jason M Allen was a contestant in this competition that used an AI program called Midjourney that turns text and prompts into hyper realistics graphics. He called his work “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial,” which translates to “Space Opera Theater” and took home a blue ribbon in the fair’s contest for digital artists. After being the first one to win a prize for an AI generated piece, he received backlash and was accused of cheating by other artists. He pointed out that he made no effort to hide the fact that he used AI by submitting his work under the name “Jason M. Allen via Midjourney”.

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.”