The work created by combining AI and PhotoShop won the Art Award. The judges did not know the origin of the work, but said they would have awarded first prize had they known it was AI-generated.
This award was won at the Colorado State Fair Digital Art Contest. Creator Jason Allen is a video game designer from Colorado. He won his $300 prize for an artwork titled “”.Theater d’Opera SpecialIt shows a bizarre old-school painting of a woman in flowing robes looking out at a misty landscape through a large circular window, by Victorian artists such as Burne-Jones and Alma-Tadema I. If I had been told it was a painting, I wouldn’t have claimed it.
In reality, Allen used Midjourney. This is an AI package that takes short descriptions and creates images that reflect those words using a technique called diffusion. Having won, Allen wrote about it on his Discord chat server and the announcement caused a lot of complaints.
The interesting thing is why people are annoyed.
Some feedback doesn’t seem to have caught up – The New York Times noted Allen:Didn’t do his entry with a brush or a lump of clay. He created it using his MidJourney, an artificial intelligence program that transforms lines of text into surreal graphics.This is rather what the competition guidelines say digital art is “Artistic practices that use digital technology as part of the creative or presentation process“
Artists on Twitter have also complained, with Twitter artist Genel Jumalon saying: “Someone entered an art competition with an AI-generated work and won first prize.
These critics seem to miss the fact that this is more of a publicity stunt than a true triumph. Jason Allen didn’t just capture AI-generated images. He says he spent weeks going through hundreds of images Midjourney made and choosing three, tweaking the images in PhotoShop and “up-scaling” them using GigaPixel AI. . Aside from the perhaps mercenary notion that 80 hours of image editing he wants better than $300, the real question is, is it AI-generated art? I don’t think so. If the original image created by Midjourney wins, no problem. However, Allen’s claim to the New York Times:
“Art is dead, dude. It’s over. AI won. Humans lost.”
It seems a little exaggerated. Careful selection by humans and AI with her 80+ hours of editing with sophisticated image editing software, at the Colorado State Fair he won his class of 18 entries (three by Allen) . I think we’ll wait until a purely AI-generated image wins the high-value, high-profile competition without long and careful editing or enhancements.
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