mymodernmet.com: When Jason Allen entered his work into the Colorado State Fair's annual art competition, he was hoping to make a splash. But he couldn't have anticipated that his artwork Théâtre D’opéra Spatial, which took home the blue ribbon in the digital art category, would cause such a stir. Allen's artwork, which was created using the AI image generator Midjourney, has sparked a fierce debate about the role of artists and the use of AI in fine art.
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I've got some Opinions about this but let me go do some research before I mouth off in the News from the Real World comments section again. Ok, I'm back. As always, the situation is more nuanced than it appears, and it's really easy to say, "Uh, fuck this guy." The way these art-generating AIs work is they're fed thousands upon thousands of images to "learn" the feel, aesthetic, layout, what-have-you of these images and generate something new based on what it's learned. This is all fine and dandy if you're doing it for kicks and not sharing/submitting it anywhere OR if the pre-curated images are free for use, public domain, or taken/created by you. It's another situation if you're submitting it to an art competition AND using images you don't have the right to use. I don't know if that's what Allen did, but it's worth thinking about. Another thing I'm thinking about is that, in my opinion, AI-generated artwork requires no technical skill. Yes, you have to curate the image sampling, but that's the same as an artist creating a mood board, searching for reference images, gathering components needed for a collage, etc. unless, again, the references were first created by you. Technical skill just isn't the same when it's a computer working out the brushstrokes for you.
Worth noting that I am not in the, "Uh, fuck this guy" camp exactly, but I do feel a little sore about AI art winning the competition.
I understand and respect both sides of the argument here. On one hand, I understand that in order to get an AI-generated art piece to look remotely close to what you had pictured, it takes a lot of patience and reiteration and redefining of the terms so that the computer can match up with your artistic vision. However, I also do think that there was some dishonesty in how this guy presented his art to the judges. Just saying that you made it in Midjourney will probably not clue everyone into the fact that this was created by a robot and I think he definitely used that to his advantage. Working with this type of new medium comes with an inherent advantage, and that is that you are asking something that is designed to know what good art looks like to make a piece for you, and you are not really going through the traditional artistic process yourself. Personally, I think this guy should always alert the judges that this was created using an AI, and I think that in the future, should he try and enter more competitions, he should find competitions meant for AI art, or at the very least, be very open about what the AI did in the work that the AI created that he may have thought about once.
I think I am more in the camp of "okay, I can respect the fact that one had to train an AI to make this...." but I still think that moving forward maybe there will one day be a category for computer assisted design that will eliminate problems like this. But it is a reality that we are going to have to face that, as AI tech gets better it is going to do a lot of the heavy lifting for us. In the same way that a popular artist might have four or five assistants working beneath them, I could absolutely see an AI creating a base image than an artist would then go and edit to get the final product that they were looking for.
That said, I feel bad for the people that entered art that they made themselves (absolutely what the spirit of the competition had in mind in the first place)
I’m back a week after calling the AI art generation cool to say that this is…definitely interesting. Art generation AI has been gaining traction recently and when I heard about this (on Twitter), my immediate reaction was that it was wrong and that people were exploiting (or using?) technology to win accolades that people spent hundreds of hours trying to do by hand. I’m not trying to devalue the work of the creator of this AI (and AI and machine learning are incredible technologies!) - that likely took a significant amount of work, but I don’t agree with entering it in a real art competition. I’m not sure how this will be approached in the future - maybe creating a new category for AI generated art? There is certainly creativity that goes into coding but entering generated work into an art competition that expects and judges hand made art is not a good way to represent that. I am very curious to see where creations like this are hosted in the future though.
This is a hard topic.=, especially as an artist myself. I do realize that we have to keep an open mind with new technologies because technology is inevitably going to sneak its way into every aspect of life - that's the future. Preserving art forms is important, but it won't last forever, at least not as we know it now. I do think it is unfair for the artist to submit the art without explaining that it was AI generated. Regardless of how much time he put into it, he was essentially letting the AI pick the concept for him. This, in comparison to artists who thought out their entire piece and built the concept completely from scratch, is not much work. Going forward, I agree with people who think a different category for AI generated art would be beneficial. I do think AI generated art is cool, but theres a point where I'm no longer interested. There's no intention behind it, and thats what excites me most about art - intention.
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