A digital artwork that won first place in a fine arts competition has inspired discussions on social media about the nature of art and what it means to be an artist.
Jason Allen came first in the Colorado State Fair’s fine arts competition on Monday using an artificial intelligence (AI)-generated artwork. according to a twitter post, the synthetic media designer announced their victory over the Discord server. Sharing pictures of the AI-generated canvases hanging at the fair, he wrote, “I took first place.”
According to State Fair website Mr Allen won the digital art category. The image, which he printed on canvas for rendering, shows 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, as Mr Allen does not paint his award-winning artwork, his exclusivity has sparked a debate on Twitter. Some people think that human artistry is doomed thanks to AI and that all artists are destined to be replaced by machines. Others believe that the art will evolve and adapt to the new technologies that come along.
One user wrote, “We are witnessing the death of artistry before our very eyes.” “If creative jobs are not protected by machines, then even high-skilled jobs are in danger of becoming obsolete. What will we have then?” another pair.
A third said, “It sucks for the exact same reason we don’t allow robots to compete in the Olympics,” while a fourth commented, “I don’t see a problem with that. Not sure how it differs from photography.” The person spent weeks refining the input, and then sifted through hundreds of options to arrive at the “best”. It requires subjective art experience. It’s not like the AI did it on its own Is.”
During this, According to KOAA News, Mr. Allen said he wrote the piece that took about 900 attempts. He revealed that he wrote the scene and edited the image for the AI to interpret. He believes that his uniqueness brings to the fore the conversation of having an AI category in future art shows.