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Friday, September 02, 2022
Artwork generated using AI software Midjourney won a state competition
The Verge: A game designer has sparked controversy after submitting an image created by an AI text-to-image generator to a state art competition and taking home first prize.
6 comments:
Monica Tran
said...
Okay there are like a lot of substantial opinions in this article about whether or not this artificial intelligence created piece of art using text to image technology is considered art and how it won in this art competition. But there are a lot of avoided questions or they're not answering them correctly about the validity of the piece winning. I don't think the competition is upset about the fact that it's not "traditional" but that the game designer wasn't being fully transparent about the generator he was using. He didn't want to clarify something he felt was super trivial while even though in the article people in the community admit that text to image generation is still relatively new to the world. People are trying to make this out to be an issue of what can be considered art or how can we judge it and if we get replaced by robots to make art and I never thought I'd have to hear that argument in my life, but here we are.
Allan, the generator of the AI image comes across as a little bit ignorant when describing how it is justified that he won this competition. The competition he entered had been against all artists who actually created their own work. All that Allan did was put a bunch of words into an AI art generator and it produced an image that he barely had anything to do with. While maybe there could be a time a place for competitive AI art because the way of creating it is entirely different than that of artists who do their own work. The time and effort put in by Allan does not equate to that of the other artists in any way. Not to mention, he equated his work of writing the prompt, fine tuning it, and curating all the results using Photoshop to someone using Adobe Illustrator. This is the point where his logic contains fallacies that people who don’t know what Illustrator is may not understand. Illustrator is merely a digital design tool that uses vectors (or shapes). None of the work done with it is autonomous. And while you could argue that the Adobe Photoshop part of the curated images constitutes it as his own work, Allan even mensions that the Photoshopping only accounted for “10%” of the work”. Would you let someone who did 10% of their piece win an art competition?
I do not believe that Allen's work possess the same effort, depth and personal connection as that of his other artistic peers. Art is more than coming up with an idea, typing it into a computer generated software and tweaking the image already presented through the software. I think this win neglects the time, training and dedication that goes into various individuals art forms and doesn't serve as an accurate representation of what art is suppose to reflect. Furthermore, the process of creating art is art itself. By diminishing the process through technological ways (which in many circumstances are not like this current issue) it takes away the vital component of inspiration and emerging creativity. Furthermore, as an artist Allen should have been completely truthful about his sources and process as to give credit to the methods they utilized and give the judges a broader perspective to consider when analyzing his work. Though technically, from what I have acquired through the article and the extended link to the competitions rules Allen did not break any rules meaning the organizers of the competition should possibly elaborate or stricken their regulations more so that instances such as this one do not emerge.
I think it’s pretty interesting how all of those text to picture generated pictures look complete when looking at the whole picture, but if you pay any attention to the objects up close you will quickly realize that something is terribly wrong with it. I think people being mad about him submitting a piece of art he didn’t “make” is stupid because defining art is against it’s very nature. This does call into question though is it his art or does the art belong to the AI. He did feed in the words, but a random word generator could have done that as well. This is I’m sure the very tip of the iceberg considering we have knowledge that deep fakes are very effective and all over the place. From a definition standpoint it also sounds like he stayed completely within the rules. I’m sure we’ll hear more about incidents like this in the coming years.
This is the type of debate that can go around in circles forever without any conclusion. It's near impossible to define art and any attempt to do so is reductive. Art should be without limitations and I will argue that anyone using artificial intelligence as a tool is still an artist. Perhaps not a conventional artist, but having worked with some digital software, it is hardly as simple as pushing a button and letting the computer do all the work.
That said, I agree with Monica that the crux of the issue is in the deception of the artist. While he clearly stated the software used, the lack of transparency is crucial. Was he being purposely vague in order to pull the wool over the eyes of the judges? But then again, I suppose we could circle back to the point about art being without limitations. Perhaps his artwork would have been disqualified or judged unfairly because of his choice of medium had he offered an explanation of Midjourney.
I don't know. Can we say the woodworker who uses a CNC router is less of a craftsman because of the reliance on a machine for the finer details? This is what I mean about the debate going around in circles. There's no clear answer because the question is subjective.
I can see how this situation would be extremely controversial. I am not quite sure I can pick a side at this point based on my basic understanding of text-to-AI image. I only first came across it this summer when a scenic designer that I know was suing it for some concept art. I don’t think they really used it for the design, only after the fact. But the results were amazing and somehow so unique to the play as well as this specific director’s concept. I don’t know everything about digital art but based off of my understanding, often times images are used that aren’t specifically created by the artist. I don’t see a huge difference between that and what this “artist” did. I think that there can be a place for this type of work in the “art” world and I don’t think it has to replace anything else. I’ve seen some cool stuff and it takes work to be able to program the software into getting something good.
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6 comments:
Okay there are like a lot of substantial opinions in this article about whether or not this artificial intelligence created piece of art using text to image technology is considered art and how it won in this art competition. But there are a lot of avoided questions or they're not answering them correctly about the validity of the piece winning. I don't think the competition is upset about the fact that it's not "traditional" but that the game designer wasn't being fully transparent about the generator he was using. He didn't want to clarify something he felt was super trivial while even though in the article people in the community admit that text to image generation is still relatively new to the world. People are trying to make this out to be an issue of what can be considered art or how can we judge it and if we get replaced by robots to make art and I never thought I'd have to hear that argument in my life, but here we are.
Allan, the generator of the AI image comes across as a little bit ignorant when describing how it is justified that he won this competition. The competition he entered had been against all artists who actually created their own work. All that Allan did was put a bunch of words into an AI art generator and it produced an image that he barely had anything to do with. While maybe there could be a time a place for competitive AI art because the way of creating it is entirely different than that of artists who do their own work. The time and effort put in by Allan does not equate to that of the other artists in any way. Not to mention, he equated his work of writing the prompt, fine tuning it, and curating all the results using Photoshop to someone using Adobe Illustrator. This is the point where his logic contains fallacies that people who don’t know what Illustrator is may not understand. Illustrator is merely a digital design tool that uses vectors (or shapes). None of the work done with it is autonomous. And while you could argue that the Adobe Photoshop part of the curated images constitutes it as his own work, Allan even mensions that the Photoshopping only accounted for “10%” of the work”. Would you let someone who did 10% of their piece win an art competition?
I do not believe that Allen's work possess the same effort, depth and personal connection as that of his other artistic peers. Art is more than coming up with an idea, typing it into a computer generated software and tweaking the image already presented through the software. I think this win neglects the time, training and dedication that goes into various individuals art forms and doesn't serve as an accurate representation of what art is suppose to reflect. Furthermore, the process of creating art is art itself. By diminishing the process through technological ways (which in many circumstances are not like this current issue) it takes away the vital component of inspiration and emerging creativity. Furthermore, as an artist Allen should have been completely truthful about his sources and process as to give credit to the methods they utilized and give the judges a broader perspective to consider when analyzing his work. Though technically, from what I have acquired through the article and the extended link to the competitions rules Allen did not break any rules meaning the organizers of the competition should possibly elaborate or stricken their regulations more so that instances such as this one do not emerge.
I think it’s pretty interesting how all of those text to picture generated pictures look complete when looking at the whole picture, but if you pay any attention to the objects up close you will quickly realize that something is terribly wrong with it. I think people being mad about him submitting a piece of art he didn’t “make” is stupid because defining art is against it’s very nature. This does call into question though is it his art or does the art belong to the AI. He did feed in the words, but a random word generator could have done that as well. This is I’m sure the very tip of the iceberg considering we have knowledge that deep fakes are very effective and all over the place. From a definition standpoint it also sounds like he stayed completely within the rules. I’m sure we’ll hear more about incidents like this in the coming years.
This is the type of debate that can go around in circles forever without any conclusion. It's near impossible to define art and any attempt to do so is reductive. Art should be without limitations and I will argue that anyone using artificial intelligence as a tool is still an artist. Perhaps not a conventional artist, but having worked with some digital software, it is hardly as simple as pushing a button and letting the computer do all the work.
That said, I agree with Monica that the crux of the issue is in the deception of the artist. While he clearly stated the software used, the lack of transparency is crucial. Was he being purposely vague in order to pull the wool over the eyes of the judges? But then again, I suppose we could circle back to the point about art being without limitations. Perhaps his artwork would have been disqualified or judged unfairly because of his choice of medium had he offered an explanation of Midjourney.
I don't know. Can we say the woodworker who uses a CNC router is less of a craftsman because of the reliance on a machine for the finer details? This is what I mean about the debate going around in circles. There's no clear answer because the question is subjective.
I can see how this situation would be extremely controversial. I am not quite sure I can pick a side at this point based on my basic understanding of text-to-AI image. I only first came across it this summer when a scenic designer that I know was suing it for some concept art. I don’t think they really used it for the design, only after the fact. But the results were amazing and somehow so unique to the play as well as this specific director’s concept. I don’t know everything about digital art but based off of my understanding, often times images are used that aren’t specifically created by the artist. I don’t see a huge difference between that and what this “artist” did. I think that there can be a place for this type of work in the “art” world and I don’t think it has to replace anything else. I’ve seen some cool stuff and it takes work to be able to program the software into getting something good.
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