Artificial intelligence creates image, wins award and revolts artists

This year, the Colorado State Fair’s annual art contest gave prizes to all the usual categories: painting, patchwork, sculpture.

But one participant, Jason M. Allen of Pueblo West, Colorado, did not do his work with a brush or a clay pellet. He created it with Midjourney, an artificial intelligence program that turns text sentences into hyperrealistic drawings.

Allen’s work, “Théâtre d’Opéra Spatial,” took the grand prize in the fair’s competition for emerging digital artists — becoming one of the first AI-generated pieces to win such an honor and triggering a fierce backlash from the artists who basically accused the cheater author.

Contacted by phone, Allen defended his work. He said he made it clear that the work – which was entered under the name “Jason M. Allen via Midjourney” – was created using AI and that he didn’t mislead anyone about its origins.

“I won’t apologize for that,” he said. “I won and didn’t break any rules.”

AI-generated art has been around for years. But tools released this year, such as DALL-E 2, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, have made it possible for hobbyists to create complex, abstract or photorealistic work simply by typing a few words into a text box.

These apps have made many artists nervous about their future: why would anyone pay for artwork, they wonder, when anyone can create them? They’ve also sparked heated debates over the ethics of AI-generated art, and opposition from people who claim these apps are essentially a form of high-tech plagiarism.

Allen, 39, started experimenting with AI-generated art this year. He has a studio, Incarnate Games, that makes board games, and he was curious about how the new breed of AI imagers might compare to the human artists whose work he commissions.

This summer, he was invited to a chat on the Discord app where people were testing Midjourney, which uses a complex process known as “diffusion” to turn text into custom images. Users type a series of words in a message to Midjourney; the bot returns an image seconds later.

Allen became obsessed, creating hundreds of images and marveling at their level of realism. No matter what he typed, Midjourney seemed capable of doing them.

“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” he said. “I felt like a demonic inspiration – like an otherworldly force was present.”

After all, Allen had the idea to send one of his creations with Midjourney to the Colorado State Fair, which had a “digital art/digitally manipulated photography” section. He asked a local store to print the image on canvas and submitted it to the judges.

“The fair was coming up,” he said, “and I thought, it would be wonderful to show people how great this art is.”

Several weeks later, while walking through the fair in Pueblo, Allen saw a blue ribbon hanging next to his piece. He had won the section, winning a $300 prize.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I thought: this is exactly what I intended to accomplish.”

(Allen declined to share the exact text he sent to Midjourney to create “Théâtre d’Opéra Spatial”. But he said the translation, “Theatre of the Space Opera”, gives a clue.)

After the win, Allen posted a photo of the award-winning work on Discord’s Midjourney chat. It ended up on Twitter, where it provoked a furious reaction.

“We are watching the death of art unfold before our eyes,” wrote one user.

“This is disgusting,” wrote another. “I can see how the art of AI can be beneficial, but claiming that you are an artist generating one? Absolutely not.”

Some artists have defended Allen, saying that using AI to create a piece is no different than using Photoshop or other digital image manipulation tools, and that human creativity is still required to find the right commands to generate an award-winning piece.

Olga Robak, a spokeswoman for the Colorado Department of Agriculture, which oversees the state fair, said Allen had adequately disclosed Midjourney’s involvement in submitting his artwork; the category rules allow for any “artistic practice that uses digital technology as part of the creative or presentation process”. The two category judges were unaware that Midjourney was an AI program, she said, but later both told her they would have awarded Allen the top prize even if they had known.

Controversy over new art creation technologies is nothing new. Many painters reacted to the invention of the photographic camera, which they saw as a degradation of human art. (Charles Baudelaire, a 19th-century French poet and art critic, called photography “the mortal enemy of art.”) In the 20th century, digital editing tools and computer drawing programs were similarly rejected by purists as demanding too much. little skill of its human collaborators.

What makes the new generation of AI tools different, some critics believe, is not just their ability to produce beautiful works of art with minimal effort. It’s how they work. Applications like DALL-E 2 and Midjourney are built from millions of images found on the web and then algorithms that learn to recognize patterns and relationships in those images and generate new ones in the same style. This means that artists who upload their work to the internet may be unwittingly helping to train their algorithmic competitors.

“What makes this AI different is that it is explicitly trained based on artists currently working,” tweeted digital artist RJ Palmer last month. “This thing wants our jobs, it’s actively anti-artist.”

Even some who were impressed by the AI-generated art have concerns about how it is being made. Andy Baio, a technologist and writer, wrote in a recent essay that the DALL-E 2, perhaps the hottest AI imager on the market, is “the limit of magic in what it can produce, but it raises so many ethical questions that it’s hard to keep up with them all”.

Allen, the grand prize winner, said he understands artists who fear AI tools will leave them out of work. But their anger should not be directed at individuals who use DALL-E 2 or Midjourney to make art, but at companies that choose to replace human artists with AI tools.

“It shouldn’t be an indictment of the technology itself,” he said. “Ethics is not in the technology. It is in the people.”

And he urged artists to overcome their objections to AI, if only as a coping strategy.

“It won’t stop,” Allen said. “Art is dead, man. It’s over. AI won. Humans lost.”