AI won an Art Contest and Artists are Upset

Credit: the artist, or the A.I. Tool, or I dunno.

AI won an Art Contest and Artists are Pissed

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But the Synthetic artist did not break any rules.

Hey Friends,

As you know I a commentator on A.I. ethics and I have my own take on what the?Synthetic Internet will do?to us.

Allen's winning image looks like a bright, surreal cross between a Renaissance and steampunk painting. (read on)

Meanwhile, in the real world, there has been a stealth win for AI-generated art inspires heated ethics debate on social media. The deepfakes are coming. So what’s all the fuss about?

AI art generators have made a huge impact in digital art in recent months. The latest generator of tools, including DALL-E 2, MidJourney and Stable Diffusion are capable of creating an incredible range of images based on text prompts – you basically tell them what you want them to create, and you are off to the races.

So here’s what happend.

Jason M. Allen was almost too nervous to enter his first art competition. Now, his award-winning image is sparking controversy about whether art can be generated by a computer, and what, exactly, it means to be an artist.

Here is his image:

Jason Allen's AI-generated art won a prize at the Colorado State Fair (Image credit: Jason Allen via Midjourney)

His official statement:

'I’m not going to apologize for it. I won, and I didn’t break any rules.'

Unfortunately many of his peers don’t feel the same way.

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.

I found this?YouTube?take on it a bit funny:

So according to CNN and others: In August, Allen, a game designer who lives in Pueblo West, Colorado,?won first place?in the emerging artist division's "digital arts/digitally-manipulated photography" category at the Colorado State Fair Fine Arts Competition. His winning image, titled "Théatre D'opéra Spatial" (French for "Space Opera Theater"), was made with?Midjourney?— an artificial intelligence system that?can produce detailed images when fed written prompts. A $300 prize accompanied his win.

Is this a case of an artist being “augmented” by A.I. or something else? Prompting and creation are definately two different things.

"I'm fascinated by this imagery. I love it. And it think everyone should see it," Allen, 39, told CNN Business in an interview.

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No mercy no malice? However, it only emerged?after the prize was awarded?that Allen had created his artwork using the Discord-based AI art generator Midjourney before upscaling it using AI Gigapixel to put on canvas.

Obviously, this upset some people.

However it’s not a crime against humanity, we just need some ground rules. Unfortunately OpenAI is being disrupted by Stale Diffusion and Midjourney and is not making any ground rules. DALL-E 2 just wants to be better, not exactly share the commercial potential of this kind of technology, with others. OpenAI is sponsored heavily by Microsoft.

Do I actually want to live in a world where?GPT-3 helps me write stories? I’m not a fiction writer of an artist, but I can see AI bots doing most of social media marketing that takes place today, it’s not complicated and definately is repetitive.

How do we soul search in a world that has no opt-in switch to potentially spammy A.I. tools? 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. It’s all rather ridiculous. Even the commentary on this reads to me like glib click-bait. But then again, I’m not looking to trend on Reddit or Hacker News.

Who am I to argue with poetry, I mean music, I mean art that’s not actually very human? It’s still a beautiful piece. 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.

I want to cry, but then again nobody ever listens to my own warnings either.

At least we have NFT profiles able to go viral on Twitter about it, I guess?

Allen, who's the founder and lead developer at the board game company?Incarnate Games(opens in new tab), had said that his pieces were created with a computer, thus they were put in the “Digital Art” category. A cunning statement to be sure, and it’s beautiful madness on an unregulated internet where Synthetic AI is actually just getting started. The DOD help found Scale AI that I think is going to be the actual leader in Synthetic A.I. How is that for weaponizing the future?

A.I. can train better on synthetic data and simulations that aren’t real.

PCgamer summarized it as follows:

The arguments for and against this are by now familiar, but boil down to the potential of AI generation software to replace human artistry and skill, and its impact both in terms of costing jobs and the implications for cultural production. There's also the fact that these things are trained on the work of humans who get no credit nor benefit from them.

The author of the Algorithmic Bridge?curates the debate?a step further. I personally have no idea about this, I’m not about to start arguing on Discord or Reddit about it either. The lack of regulation in the space is just appalling and as A.I. gets more into psychological counseling, education, marketing and sales - there’s going to be some pretty awesome debates, but who will make the profits? It will be BigTech.

Even how this trends on YouTube, Reddit, Hacker News or a Substack article is completely arbitrary and itself fake and click-bait esque. The debates also have zero impact on the outcome.

I’m left feeling a bit nihilistic, in that BigTech itself says A.I. and automation is going to create “all kinds of new jobs”. They omit of course that they will be the major beneficiary from a revenue standpoint of all of these little tools. Who do you suppose will acquire the Grammarlys’ and Jasper.AIs’ of this world in addition to all of this open-source text to image generators?

The weaponization of A.I. occurs each day, and A.I ethics aren’t even being followed by major companies. And the best we can do is be upset about someone hacking an art contest with a deepfake?

Artists (and non-artists) have responded with fury, with many people seeing the use of an AI art generator in an art competition as cheating. Fury on the internet, you don’t say? Is it still trending a few hours later? We’ve created an increasingly fake internet, period.

Unbelievable.

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