AI wins state fair art contest, annoys humans

[bilateralrope]

Ars Technica

Stealth win for AI-generated art inspires heated ethics debate on social media.
BENJ EDWARDS - 9/1/2022, 9:19 AM

A synthetic media artist named Jason Allen entered AI-generated artwork into the Colorado State Fair fine arts competition and announced last week that he won first place in the Digital Arts/Digitally Manipulated Photography category, Vice reported Wednesday based on a viral tweet.

Allen used Midjourney—a commercial image synthesis model available through a Discord server—to create a series of three images. He then upscaled them, printed them on canvas, and submitted them to the competition in early August. To his delight, one of the images (titled Théåtre D'opéra Spatial) captured the top prize, and he posted about his victory on the Midjourney Discord server on Friday.

Allen's victory prompted lively discussions on Twitter, Reddit, and the Midjourney Discord server about the nature of art and what it means to be an artist. Some commenters think human artistry is doomed thanks to AI and that all artists are destined to be replaced by machines. Others think art will evolve and adapt with new technologies that come along, citing synthesizers in music. It's a hot debate that Wired covered in July.

There's also the fairness element since it isn't clear if Allen told the judges about his use of image synthesis, though some Twitter users have reportedly contacted the judges and discovered that they didn't know. Curiously, the art was considered good enough to fool human artists, and someone on Twitter joked that it settled the debate over "whether AI art is art."

It's worth noting that the invention of the camera in the 1800s prompted similar criticism related to the medium of photography, since the camera seemingly did all the work compared to an artist that labored to craft an artwork by hand with a brush or pencil. Some feared that painters would forever become obsolete with the advent of color photography. In some applications, photography replaced more laborious illustration methods (such as engraving), but human fine art painters are still around today.

Image synthesis tools in their current state require a high degree of human guidance and cherry-picking to achieve remarkable results, but the field is evolving rapidly, and that might not always be the case. Still, as long as new artistic tools emerge, the "Is it art?" debate will likely continue as long as there are people to have the discussion.

This is going to shake up art creation. A change from having to create the picture directly to creating the phrase to get the AI to do what you want.

[ray245]

Still art. I've tried AI art creation, and you can still tell the difference between me ( a total noob) and a talented creator. It's what they can think of becomes key rather than the purely technical level of art.

It's your imagination itself rather than technical quality that becomes important.

[Formless]

There's one bit of bad news for him that will keep AI generated art to a minimum: legally, you can't copyright artwork generated by an animal, computer or AI. It has to have a human hand in there somewhere, or else its in the same boat as that famous monkey selfie. Only humans have copyrights, and in order to have those rights you had to be involved in the creative process. You can thank PETA and their incompetent lawyering for that ruling.

[bilateralrope]

I can see three areas that make that a bit more complex:
- If the AI includes elements that are protected under copyright, trademark or other IP laws.
- How much human effort at what points in the creation process is needed to make it protectable
- Once the AI develops enough for large businesses to start using it, they can lobby for a law change.