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.”
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.
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.