The Colorado State Fair’s art competition included a person who used an AI-generated artwork to take home the top prize. Jason Allen, also known as Sincarnate on Discord, made the announcement that he had won the digital arts division of the Colorado State Fair fine arts competition on the Midjourney channel.
He informed the channel devoted to image-generating AI Midjourney, “After a one-month break, I have returned with an exciting news regarding my personal project I’ve produced utilising Midjourney.
“I have been experimenting with a particular prompt that I will be posting at a later time. I have made hundreds of photos with it, and after several weeks of curating and fine-tuning my gens, I picked my favourite three and had them printed on canvas after upscaling using Gigapixel A.I.”
He told them the sculpture was created on a computer and they invited him to join the competition in the digital arts category using these photos. Allen stated that he told the competitors that it was created by “Jason Allen via Midjourney,” the name of his firm, Incarnate Games, which makes tabletop fantasy games.
“I set out to use Midjourney in a competitive manner to make a statement, and wow! I am beyond thrilled to have won with “Theatre d’Opera Spatial,” my favourite work.
The sculpture was created artificially, but one of the competition judges, art historian Dagny McKinley, told the Washington Post that she would still have voted for it since Allen “had an idea and a vision he brought to life, and it’s really a lovely picture.”
Despite his defence of the piece as art, Allen calls himself “not an artist.” Numerous artists concurred with him on this issue.
“For a moment, ignore the existence of AI art. Someone sends a bunch of prompts to an artist, who then creates the art and sends it back to the prompt writer. The artist then enters the artwork in a competition under their own name and triumphs. That’s not right, “Chris Shehan, a comic book artist, tweeted something.
“The person who created it by typing words into the AI is not an artist, but the AI is not a person. They didn’t make anything. They, at best, worked together. Because there isn’t a person on the other end, they may claim credit for the partnership. This ought to be prohibited. It is awful.”
Allen, on the other hand, notes to The Washington Post that it took him 80 hours and more than 900 iterations to perfect the prompt input, which Midjourney translates into an image. He had to use Photoshop to make further hand adjustments to some components, such as giving someone the AI had judged complete a head when they didn’t have one.
He recognised in a post on Discord that he was probably being attacked for a lack of competence or effort, but he defended the work nonetheless.
“What if we took it to the opposite extreme, what if an artist imposed an incredibly challenging and intricate sequence of limitations in order to make a piece, say, by painting while suspended upside-down and being spanked? (this is extreme.) Should the work of this artist be judged differently from the work of another artist who produced the identical item “normally”? “He composed.
“I know what will happen to this in the end; they will probably just establish a “artificial intelligence art” category for items like this,” the author said.
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