This AI-Generated Artwork Won 1st Place At Fine Arts Contest And Enraged Artists

In May 1997, the chess supercomputer Deep Blue sensationally won a full-fledged match against world champion Garry Kasparov, who was almost in his prime. "Okay," said many experts at the time. "Chess is cool, but there are also much more tactically sophisticated games where a person can show their imagination, inaccessible to a computer. For example, Go."

Almost twenty years later, in March 2016, the AlphaGo program defeated one of the best Go masters on the planet, Lee Sedol, with a score of 4: 1 in games. Three years later, he left the sport, admitting that computer algorithms had become so superior to humans that competition with people simply lost its meaning.

"Well," said then the participants in the discussions about the possibilities of artificial intelligence. "After all, it's just a game where there is a given set of rules and conditions, within which the computer surpasses the human mind. But there are also some areas of activity where unbridled fantasy is needed, accessible only to people. For example, in fine art..." You are here for now...

More info: Twitter

Or rather, you were here. On August 26, the Colorado State Fair started in Pueblo, which also included a fine arts competition. The Digital Arts award was won by local designer Jason Allen's "Théâtre D'opéra Spatial", one of three entries he submitted to the contest. Really beautiful and impressive painting, for sure.

Thunder struck a few days later when Allen tweeted that the picture was actually generated using Midjourney, a commercial neural network for generating images from a given text description, which runs on the basis of the Discord messenger and is available to literally everyone.

Allen, with the help of Midjourney, generated several hundred images, choosing three of them that he liked the most. Then the man slightly processed each of the paintings using Adobe Photoshop, enlarged it in size using another neural network - Gigapixel AI, and then printed it on canvas and sent to the competition.

Of course, Allen did a lot of preparatory work, because in order to get a really effective and beautiful artwork, you need to experiment with the choice of prompts for Midjourney. In the end - try it yourself - we guarantee that on the first attempt, you will not get a masterpiece. Yes, and with the tenth, twentieth and more as well.

Allen states that he noted that AI was used while creating the artwork, labelling it as "Jayson Allen via Midjourney". However, according to Cal Duran and Dagny McKinley, the judges of the fine arts competition, they were not warned that they were evaluating the work of a neural network, and not a human being, and were judging, first of all, how the art tells a story. And the official list of winners doesn't say anything about Midjourney either. In any case, out of twenty-one entries submitted to the contest, they chose the one that was generated by artificial intelligence.

And here the question really arises - how far can AI be considered the author of the work, because, in Allen's own words, he really spent a lot of time to find the right description for the neural network. And anyone who has ever worked with something like Midjourney will agree. Of course, if you write the famous "Draw me a sheep" from "The Little Prince" in the prompt, the result will not be as primitive as in the famous book, but it will not win the fine art contest either.

In any case, there are two points of view here. One of them calls to consider AI just a tool for the human creator - the way the camera became almost two hundred years ago. And indeed, then, at the beginning of the 19th century, many critics said that technology would bring death to art - after all, no artist reproduces reality the way a photo camera does.

But years have passed - and we see that photography, on the contrary, gave art a new impetus in the form of impressionism, surrealism, suprematism, and many other trends that arose, as if by coincidence, just after photography began its triumphant march around the world. As for photographers, aren't Annie Leibovitz, Helmut Newton or Henri Cartier-Bresson considered great artists?

On the other hand, who can be considered, for example, the author of the great fresco "The Last Judgment"? Michelangelo, who painted it, or the Pope, who told the artist in detail his own vision of the painting? From this point of view, of course, the author is AI - and the discussion about its capabilities is entering a new round.

We must say that the participants of this discussion on Twitter also shared their opinions. For example, artist Genel Jumalon believes that AI is just a useful tool for the creator, but in this case, you should simply inform the judges of the competition about the use of the neural network. Going forward, Genel believes AI-created work should be separated into a special competitive category.

Other people think it's just like winning a footrace using a car, and human and computer art should not be confused anyway. In any case, with the development of artificial intelligence, more and more questions will arise, and humanity will sooner or later have to create a new paradigm of its co-existence.

We're pretty sure you've got something to say on this topic as well, so please feel free to express your point of view in the comments. Be that as it may, one thing you can be absolutely sure of is that this very post was 100 percent written by a human!