A digital artwork that won first place in a fine art competition has sparked a social media conversation about the nature of art and what it means to be an artist.
Jason Allen placed first in the Colorado State Fair’s fine arts competition on Monday using artificial intelligence (AI) generated artwork. According to A Twitter post, the synthetic media designer declared his victory on the Discord server. “I won first place,” he wrote while sharing pictures of AI-generated canvases hanging at the fair.
According to On the State Fair website, Mr. Allen won in the Digital Art category. For the submission he showed the image, printed on canvas, of classical figures standing in a baroque hall. He created his piece using an online program called Midjourney, an AI art tool using a text-to-image generator.
Now, since Mr. Allen has not painted his award-winning artwork, his separation has sparked controversy on Twitter. Some people think that human artistry is doomed by AI and that all artists have been replaced by machines. Others believe that art will evolve and adapt to new technologies.
“We are witnessing the death of artistry before our eyes,” wrote one user. If creative jobs are not protected from machines, even high-skilled jobs are at risk of becoming obsolete. So what will we have?” added another.
“It’s bad for the same reason we don’t let robots in the Olympics,” said a third, while a fourth commented, “I don’t see a problem with it. Not sure how this differs from photography. The person spent weeks refining the input, and then used hundreds of options to arrive at the “best”. It requires subjective art experience. It’s not like the AI did it on its own. ”
Meanwhile, Accordingly KOAA News, Mr. Allen said he wrote the piece in about 900 attempts. He revealed that he wrote the scene to explain the AI and also edited the footage. He believes that its uniqueness opens up the conversation of having an AI category in future art shows.
