Human uses AI to win art competition—other humans angry

pcgamer.com:

Jason Allen lives in Colorado, and last week lit the fuse on a debate that's going to run and run: he used AI software to create art, submitted it to the Colorado State Fair fine arts(opens in new tab) competition, and took first prize. Needless to say, some people don't like the idea. 

There are a few important facts to note. Allen did kind of acknowledge what he'd done, in crediting his submissions as being by 'Jason Allen via Midjourney', and also spent considerable time working on the prompts to produce the eventual artworks: «many weeks» he says. He also worked further on the images Midjourney created in Photoshop, so they are manually finished.

But of course this is nuance next to the central issue: an AI artbot just beat-out human artists, and was clearly also plausible enough to fool human judges.

Midjourney(opens in new tab) is one of the many AI image generation tools emerging at the moment, and is currently in beta. The user enters text prompts and the software generates images based on the associations therein. This means there is an element of human finesse to what it produces, as specific language in different combinations can produce a wide range of outcomes. There's a large element of automation to these things, in other words, but they are still fundamentally tools to be manipulated by humans: and as the old computer saying goes, garbage in means garbage out.

Allen's images are certainly not garbage: they're beautiful. His winning piece is called 'Théâtre D'opéra Spatial' and took the prize in the state fair's digital art category. It was printed on canvas, and shows a bunch of figures staring out of a dark interior towards a sunny sci-fi landscape.

Following the win, Allen posted about it on Discord, a