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AI wins state fair art contest, annoys humans

206 points by yreg 4y ago

fithisux 4y ago
AI is supposed to make our life easier not harder. In the second case we may not need it.
pmontra 4y ago
> 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. I think this settles the matter. It's not as if the camera or the AI registered themselves to the art contest and submitted their work. A tool is a tool. Of course we can limit which tools are allowed, as there are car races, horse races and bicycle races. Maybe there are no Photoshop art contests.
- yreg 4y ago
  I'm convinced that in a few years all digital artists are going to use these models as a part of their workflow, perhaps directly integrated into their graphic editors.
  - Farow 4y ago
    Someone already made a Stable Diffusion extension for Photoshop: https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wyduk1/show_rstablediffusion_integrating_sd_in_photoshop/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wyduk1/sho...
    - danielbln 4y ago
      There are also plugins in the work for Krita and Gimp: https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/x209sb/preview_of_next_feature_of_my_stable_diffusion/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/x209sb/pre... https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wzfohj/wip_stable_diffusion_plugin_for_gimp/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wzfohj/wip...
  - MathYouF 4y ago
    The team I work on is building tooling with exactly that in mind, making this a part of an artists workflow rather than any sort of replacement.
- westoncb 4y ago
  The situation with AI art is significantly complicated by the fact that we can't easily distinguish between works produced with vs. without it; with cameras/photography that wasn't as much of an issue, which prevented it from being a true encroachment (not to mention the potential subject matter of photography is a small subset of what's more generally possible in human-created art)—with AI art toes and much more will be stepped on and people will be pissed. (Photoshop I see as a separate issue; people take it better because it still resembles traditional methods to such a large degree.)
  - px43 4y ago
    > we can't easily distinguish between works produced with vs. without it If you've played with any of these tools for 5-10 minutes, you'll know what to look for to quickly identify purely generated images. Have a look at some of these people https://thispersondoesnotexist.com https://thispersondoesnotexist.com After flicking through 10 or so of these, you'll start to become more sensitive to the subtle inconsistencies in symmetry, colors, and the unnatural way high contrast transitions take place, etc, and it's the same with anything that comes out of any of these art generating tools. With time, those particular aberrations can be smoothed over, but I think it's kind of like how when we saw Jurassic Park in 1995, lots of people were blown away about the realism of the dinosaurs, but when you watch it now, they just seem like plastic toy figures. Over time, we've become more sensitive to recognizing computer generated animations. Subtle issues with lighting, hair, shadows, etc. When new technology comes out, it takes some time to recognize how to spot these quirks, but over time it becomes pretty obvious. I see some amazing artists using midjourney etc, and then clipping together fragments and painting over them using classic digital art tooling, with some astounding results. As with any artistic tooling technology, the real winners are going to be the artists that learn to embrace the tech.
    - forgotpwd16 4y ago
      Someone should make an AI that finds out whether a work is AI generated.
    - westoncb 4y ago
dlkf 4y ago
”The camera will never compete with the brush and palette until such time as photography can be taken to Heaven or Hell.” - Edvard Munch
- lioeters 4y ago
  I think machine learning is getting closer to photographing heaven or hell, capturing images from the imaginary realm of all possible images.
  - dlkf 4y ago
    I don’t think you understand what Munch meant.
    - gjm11 4y ago
      What do you think Munch meant? I don't know whether there's more context for his quip that makes its meaning more explicit, but it looks to me as if it means: the painter, unlike the camera, is not limited to neutral depiction of actually visible things; a painting can be fantastical (showing some imagined heaven or hell) or can convey emotion as well as literal photons (enabling the viewer to share the artist's own internal heaven or hell). lioeter's comment focuses on the first of those unphotographic possibilities, and as far as that goes it's clearly correct: AI systems like DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion are able to make depictions of things that don't actually exist, so that limitation of the camera has been transcended. But the same is happening to the second too. Mundanely, if you ask DALL-E for "a man standing on a bridge, expressing ..." you get quite different (and, I think, appropriate) results depending on whether you finish it with "horror, dismay, and misery" or "contentment, excitement, and joy". But that's also true if instead of "a man standing on a bridge" you put "abstract impressionist painting of a city". These systems do in fact know something about mood and atmosphere and emotion, in the sense that if you ask them for joy or misery they do produce images that communicate some degree of joy or misery. (At least sometimes. I tried asking DALL-E for "abstract impressionist painting of a man on a bridge by a fjord at sunset, expressing ..." and I can't say it made the "joy" ones any more joyful or less miserable than the "misery" ones. Same with "post-impressionist oil painting ...". I tried the same with Stable Diffusion and it also didn't really manage. Score one for Edvard Munch.) They don't seem anywhere close to being able to do that as well as human artists can, though maybe someone more skilled with prompt engineering than I am could get much better results. But they're heading in that direction.
NicoleJO 4y ago
This is yet another article that misses the point, which that these art generators create images from stolen copyrighted art on the web. None of the winning piece belonged to the winner!
- Kiro 4y ago
  If you think everyone is consistently missing the point, then maybe your point is not what people actually care about.
  - qu4z-2 4y ago
    I mean, that's just tautological, kinda.
  - mandmandam 4y ago
    To be fair, many people are missing many points on this issue. People miss that the tech is here, and it's not going away. We've open sourced it already. It's burgeoning at a wild speed. Most people seem to miss that this artist was entirely honest about his use of AI assistance. Many are missing the point that this was a casual art competition; a state fair. There wasn't a huge prize at stake. Many are missing the fact that there was undeniably artistry in the methods used, including weeks of work, touch ups with Photoshop, etc. I doubt that one in 100 people could get a work like this from MidJourney even given a week of unlimited research and experimentation. People don't care about these issues. It's ignorance. Trying to have a fruitful discussion on this stuff when basic facts are left by the wayside is like trying to drink water with a fork.
  - NicoleJO 4y ago
    I inadvertently excluded the news, which has thus far been smart enough to address the issue.
- yreg 4y ago
  Creating derivative works, getting inspired and stealing styles and ideas is a cornerstone of art, present throughout all of its history.
- 4y ago
ghusto 4y ago
This only re-enforces what I already believe; that most critics — and especially art critics — mistake what they don't understand for deeper meaning. There is a snobbery in the art world that arises from a lack of self-confidence, resulting in an emperors-new-clothes situation. So an image like this — which by the way, I will admit I find on some level beautiful and interesting to look at — which doesn't have any intention behind it, is thought to probably be be some kind of deep art.
- bilekas 4y ago
  I'm inclined to agree. I like the image, its pleasing to me. So that's all I personally care for. There seems to be a debate though over 'what is art?' more-so than anything else as alluded to in the article : > 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. For me the question is moot.
  - tommiegannert 4y ago
    > There seems to be a debate though over 'what is art?' The question matters deeply to those trying to make art tradeable. Their business is about maintaining scarcity (a.k.a. non-fungibility), so they'll spend up to some portion of their profit margins on gatekeeping and defending terminology.
    - fbn79 4y ago
      Making a parallelism with Fountain by "Duchamp". Duchamp is the Artist not the company that designed and produced the urinal. The same way the Artist is the person that summoned the AI to get that picture.
      - beardyw 4y ago
        Fountain very particularly didn't try to be something it wasn't and didn't win a prize. It was genuinely disruptive to the concept of what is art. This is almost the opposite - something folks here say they would hang on their wall. But that would apply if it was a copy of someone else's picture. To some extent that is what it is. Not sure in that case it should win a prize.
svsoc 4y ago
I have no stance on whether this is good/ethical/art at all but given all the "it's obvious that these images are by an AI", "so called AI art doesn't have soul and that's why people won't use it" or "it can't compete with real human art" takes of late it was kind of refreshing to see someone make this point.
- brontosaurusrex 4y ago
  Is it made by an ai? Or is a fusion of stuff it found online? If 2nd, then is the piece produced anything else than forgery? (No idea personally, but I do like the disruptive element of it all).
  - dagw 4y ago
    'remixing' existing works into your own creation is both well established an accepted within the art world. Nobody would consider it forgery to do that.
    - brontosaurusrex 4y ago
      The art world? So we are just fine with 'empty' aesthetics? (that is disruptive) So the new definition of art would be: 'a human/ai product of any kind, be it remix or whatever you can sell as art'.
      - dagw 4y ago
        Personally I take a rather maximalist definition of art. If you self-identify as an artist and do something with the sole intention of it being art, then it is art. It can be ugly, boring, derivative, uninspiring and trivial, none of that makes it any less 'art', it just makes it bad art.
femto113 4y ago
This guy should return the prize and apologize for deceiving the judges. The rules state: "All items entered for the competition must be entered in the name of the person who created the entry." If Allen had hired 100 humans to create images based on his prompt, and then submitted his favorite of those under his name I don't think anyone would consider that legitimate. IMO having Midjourney generate 100 images is no different: Allen did not "create" this art, it was created by Midjourney (and by proxy, by all of the artists it trained on).
- yreg 4y ago
  "Allen said that he made clear that his artwork was generated with Midjourney, an online AI art tool, when he was dropping off his artwork and in his narrative submission. Olga Robak, the director of communications with the Colorado Department of Agriculture, confirmed that Allen mentioned Midjourney in his submission statement. According to fair rules, anybody can file a grievance against submitted items — but they will need to post a $300 bond, cite specific rules that have been broken and present a grievance letter in person. The bond can be returned if the grievance leads to a violation of the rules but Robak said a preliminary review showed Allen had not broken any." — https://eu.chieftain.com/story/news/2022/08/31/ai-painting-wins-at-colorado-state-fair-pueblo-artist-explains-jason-allen/65466872007/ https://eu.chieftain.com/story/news/2022/08/31/ai-painting-w...
  - Jarmsy 4y ago
    That "an online AI art tool" in the first sentence is potentially misleading, as the clarification is being made in this article, but this clarification was not made by the artist at the time. He said (in the Midjourney Discord) that when submitting he "stated that he made them via Midjourney", but it sounds like he didn't make clear that this was an AI tool. Sincarnate — 26/08/2022 Yes the description clearly stated I created them via Midjourney starshadowx2 — 26/08/2022 Was it explained what Midjourney was though Sincarnate — 26/08/2022 This is why I did it. Should I have explained what Midjourney was? If so, why? He also mentions that he originally mentioned Midjourney in the caption, but didn't correct them when they edited that part out. I think these sorts of details do matter.
dcastm 4y ago
Note that the guy who submitted the images to the contest created hundreds of images, and spent weeks finetuning the prompts and curating the results. Midjourney/Stable Diffusion/DALLE are doing to Photoshop what it did to traditional drawing methods. But there's still a human in the loop.
- hourago 4y ago
  > Note that the guy who submitted the images to the contest created hundreds of images, and spent weeks finetuning the prompts and curating the results. Let a monkey write for a million years and choose the best writing. I think that currently AI is better than that, but not so far as to be a misleading comparation.
  - danogentili 4y ago
    Why the downvotes? This is the perfect analogy :)
  - tromp 4y ago
    If the monkey only has 10% chance to pick each word appropriately, then in a million years of picking one word per second, you expect only 14 consecutive appropriate words. To get just 100 consecutive appropriate words would take the monkey 10^100 seconds, or over 10^83 billion years...
- mid-kid 4y ago
  This. People are saying an AI made it, but it sure as hell couldn't have without serious time and effort by the author.
- Last5Digits 4y ago
  There is still a human in the loop for now, but I'd wager a guess that this won't be the case for long. A lot of the "humans will still be needed" arguments implicitly rely on the assumption that the trend of AI progress stops here. The original DALL-E was released just a year ago. In one year, AI image generation went from generating images that looked slightly normal if you squinted really hard, to the beautiful, detailed and creative results we see today. The same speed of progress can be observed in almost all other domains, from code generation to question answering and music synthesis. For many of these problems, it almost feels like the next step up in quality is just two hours of planning and a couple months of training away. Like they're already solved and just waiting for someone to implement the solution. So yeah, humans are still needed right now. But I wouldn't base my hopes for the future on that, because the world of AI capabilities will probably look very different in just one year.
reacharavindh 4y ago
Does anybody know if it is possible to get a high res image of this art? I would love to print it and hang it in my office…
in3d 4y ago
What struck me when reading through many outraged tweets of artists was how it was all about the rules, copyright, the art critics, the other artists, the financial aspects, and most of all personal attacks on the submitter. Nobody gave a damn about the art consumers and their preferences. Sure, it probably should become a separate category in competitions and it could suck for lower-level artists. But it makes me think that this whole industry needs a realignment.
- salawat 4y ago
  >But it makes me think that this whole industry needs a realignment. Truer words have never before been spoken. However, I think it applies more to the tech industry than the Art world.
- esperent 4y ago
  In the context of an art competition those are all reasonable arguments. For a competition between humans to be meaningful, there have to be artificial constraints put in place. For a weightlifting competition, those constraints are things like "don't use steroids" and "don't use an invisible string to assist you in lifting the weights". For an art competition, the constraints might be things like "don't use AI to generate the image" or "don't hire another artist to do the work for you". In all of these cases, breaking the constraints is still work. Using steroids is dangerous and may be illegal. Hiring another artist is time consuming and expensive. Getting good results from an AI model takes many iterations and a lot of tweaking. If you just care about the result then it doesn't matter how the heavy lumps of metal were lifted, or who created the aesthetically pleasing artwork. But if you care about the competition, then these constraints are important.
  - fjkdlsjflkds 4y ago
    > For an art competition, the constraints might be things like "don't use AI to generate the image" [...] This is a good point. But... 1) Was that actually explicitly stated as a constraint in this specific art competition? If not, then no (explicit) rules were broken, I guess. 2) Unlike rules such as "don't use steroids" (which can be enforced through testing), it might be more complicated to effectively enforce rules such as "don't use AI to generate the image": even if you assume some perfect "watermarking" process (that would mark an image as "AI-generated" vs. "human-generated"), nothing prevents a person from indirectly using AI in the generation of digital art (e.g., prompt -> generate image using AI -> paint over image using pbrush.exe, deleting all watermarks in the process). My point: though you make a fair point, rules that cannot be effectively enforced can be seen as somewhat unfair (since they only affect honest people).
taylorius 4y ago
This is clearly the death of art as we know it. By removing any and all skill from the process of creation, it inevitably renders the creation worthless.
- dagw 4y ago
  We've been through "the death of art as we know it" so many times throughout history already and art has always continued to grow and flourish. I fail to see why this time should be any different.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  Obviously the creation was not worthless for many people, they enjoyed the picture very much. Perhaps it's an indication (or a reminder!) that for most people the worth of a piece of art does not depend on the skill or the process of creation, but mostly on the esthetics of the outcome; it's the death of a specific aspect of art which is the focus of art critics and some of the artists, but can be ignored by the 'art consumers'.
  - taylorius 4y ago
    >it's the death of a specific aspect of art which is the focus of art critics and some of the artists, but can be ignored by the 'art consumers'. Fair enough, I'd agree with that - but I think there is no-one left but "art consumers". One could imagine a version of instagram, where the user could scroll through pages of images, all of which were generated by AI. Is that user of Instagram then an artist if they pick a favourite? If I scroll through real instagram and pick a favourite, am I now an artist?
- fleddr 4y ago
  No, it doesn't. Output is value, not input. When you look at a high-end photo that you like, one of perhaps hundreds that you see in a day, do you do a detailed background check on the input? Explore the "life experience" of the photographer? Try to guess some deeper meaning? Study the technical approach and gear used, in order to come to the ultimate appreciation of how this outcome came to be? No, you don't. You look at it for 2 secs, go "nice picture" and move on.
SMAAART 4y ago
Technology is disruptive, and the Art world is not immune to disruption by tech. Similar arguments were made about 100 years ago when photography entered the Art world.
TheAceOfHearts 4y ago
The best comment on this issue that I've heard so far[0]: > Out: Art that makes the public mad by deconstructing the idea of art > In: Art that makes artists mad by deconstructing the idea of artist There's space for various forms of art competition. You could have pure competitions with stricter constraints on what is or isn't allowed. I love that humanity has developed so many new highly advanced tools which allow greater artistic expression by a broader range of people. The creation of the synthesizer didn't kill the guitar, it just opened the door to a whole new world of musical expression. If I wanted to capitalize on the AI craze that's currently happening I'd host an AI-generated art competition / exibition. I'm surprised nobody from the companies that are developing these AI tools has tried doing that. It would be really interesting to see what kinds of works people are coming up with after investing dozens or hundreds of hours into these AI tools. I suspect a lot of AI artwork will end up looking kinda same-y after a while, but a few people will figure out how to hack around with prompt engineering to get really interesting and unique results. [0] https://twitter.com/C_Harwick/status/1564948225781555202 https://twitter.com/C_Harwick/status/1564948225781555202
- mistrial9 4y ago
  > The creation of the synthesizer compare music as played in a cultural setting, say 100 years ago. and the avalanche of dance tracks in the last thirty years (ravers, you are not invited to do this test). Honestly tell me that creatively nothing is lost in musical arts.
  - esrauch 4y ago
    Except people said the same thing in 1970 compared to 1870 when there was essentially no digital influence on art in 1970. Compared to the 1800s, art has been pushed towards things that are "simpler" in all areas and it's not because of digitalization. Rothko didn't happen because of a bucket fill tool.
    - throwaway4aday 4y ago
      > art has been pushed towards things that are "simpler" in all areas This can't be true for still images. Not only the quantity of art being produced by digital means but the variation and quality has exploded since the democratization of digital painting. Certain styles are in vogue but there are countless examples of wild experimentation. Technical ability also seems greatly enhanced by these tools. Add to that all of the forms that weren't even possible 30 years ago and I strongly doubt we are in any way losing variety or quality in art. Maybe the sheer quantity is the problem, it's harder to find the really great art amongst the ever expanding ocean of generic art.
klrtank 4y ago
- Kamq 4y ago
  I'd totally buy a copy of it explicitly because it made a bunch of art judges look like fools.
gonzo41 4y ago
I like the image. However, it looks like an oil painting, but I think it's a print stretched on canvas like you see in coffee shops. So it's a digital creation. Whilst not any less of a way to create art. I like classical mediums, including photography (not digital). I think the physical human work of making the art is an important part of what makes something art. I don't discount digital art at all. I just like the older mediums. Anyway, that's just my opinion and I think making nice pictures is a good enough reason to do anything. The creation is the point. Anyway, good for the owner of the AI who created it?
- kamranjon 4y ago
  What is your take on the similarity to the advent of photography? It was mentioned in the article that photography was similarly criticized for removing much of the work involved in painting by hand.
  - gonzo41 4y ago
    I like and approve of analogue photography. I don't really like digital. It makes most images now. But large format photography is a challenge and requires a lot of skill, you have to get it right there at the moment of capture. There's something real about having been in a place, and done a physical thing to record a moment in a way. Digital just...everything's filtered... nothing feels real. And whilst you can do a LOT of darkroom tricks like slicing two negatives together and using filters to highlight things, there's a limit. But again, It's what I like. Some will agree, some will not. I'm happy with what I like and see stacks of digital art I just find myself more drawn to non digital stuff. It perhaps is a side effect of working with tech all day.
  - forgotusername6 4y ago
    Photography of course evolved into an art discipline of its own. Along with it came billions of low effort terrible pictures. I'm expecting AI art to follow the same pattern. Amazing human lead compositions alongside generic pieces.
    - 4y ago
oh_my_goodness 4y ago
"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." Very tough business to make a living in now, though.
- MontyCarloHall 4y ago
  Very tough business to make a living in back then, too.
  - oh_my_goodness 4y ago
    Yeah. I'm curious whether photography made it harder to make a living as an artist, or whether it was always very tough and photography didn't make much difference.
YetAnotherNick 4y ago
I was browsing the contest site and came across the description of the judge for the contest. I couldn't laugh harder. Have you had a dream where it felt as if it was real? Do you feel the earth guide you to something that feels right? Have you felt a portal of some distant reality exist alongside of us? Art has been a portal to channel my indigenous ancestors, where I slip under an emotional spinning vortex of creation. The makers of my blood flow through me. I channel the artisans, craft-makers, mud-dwellers, star-makers, dream-weavers and earth-brothers and sisters — the ones who paved the way and forged the path. My work carries spirit and my truth is in everything I create. [0]: https://coloradostatefair.com/competitions/general-entry-fine-arts/fine-arts-exhibition/ https://coloradostatefair.com/competitions/general-entry-fin...
wrp 4y ago
This is an occasion to remind folks of Harold Cohen's AARON, over which much ink has been spilled. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARON)
gchamonlive 4y ago
Maybe the future is not that bleak. I would love to see A.I. take over strictly commercial art. And paradoxically enough, this is NOT the case here. Yes, A.I. generated the finalist image, but WE as humans make that art. The picture is sterile up until the very moment it sparks social discussions as it is doing right now. A.I. overtaking jobs is a very human subject. It does not matter how much A.I. evolve, art will only become art if appreciated by humans. Even when A.I. evolve enough to be in a level self-evolving and be influenced by art, their needs will be different from ours, and we will still maintain control over how art impact us. What we are seeing is not the death of art, but a flaw in our social system, with the livelihood and dignity of individuals being directly tied to their functional importance to society, like cogs in a machine. That is what I think we need to attack. For all things art, I hope A.I. will help us divorce from the insidious form of commercial art and leave us time to focus on actual art that usher positive social change. An interesting take on that is in Marcuse's One Dimensional Man.
isolli 4y ago
> 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. Isn't it photography that prompted painters to explore other forms of painting like impressionism (eventually with great success)? I wonder what the current wave of technical innovations might trigger in terms of artistic expression...
rvz 4y ago
This is exactly why we need detectors for this sort of technology. Like with DeepFake detectors there should also be detectors for DALL-E 2, Stability AI, etc. The whole technology (especially AI technology, Deep Learning) is a dystopian creation and nothing good comes out of it. As for this art contest, I would just disqualify digital art all together and only allow hard copy, physical oil on canvas paintings. (And no, not a printed copy)
- fleddr 4y ago
  Not going to happen. Already advanced AI authors combine many tools. They may use their own image/photos as input (which is non-AI), combine with AI, compose objects/layers, fine-tune, inpaint, outpaint, text inversion and that's about a single week of progress. You can't stop this even if you tried.
  - rvz 4y ago
    > You can't stop this even if you tried. Who said stop? I said 'detect'. DeepFakes have detectors, there are GPT-3 detectors already being developed and the same will happen with DALL-E 2 / Stable Diffusion. I won't be surprised to see someone develop such a detector for both of these AI tools as a research project.
    - fleddr 4y ago
      It depends on what you mean, detection of specifically a deep fake, or the detection of AI involvement in image creation in general? Detection of a deepfake, for example a generated photo of a person of something that never actually happened, may be in the real of possibilities, but still difficult. Detection of AI in an artistic image? Not a chance.
fleddr 4y ago
Yes, you can debate the fairness angle. But an important angle is missed here. Apparently, this output, in whichever way it was constructed, was favored. Maybe it's just pretty, maybe it emotes, maybe it communicates something very well. I don't know, but I assume the jury was competent in being an art judge. My point is that this redirects a lot of talking points by artists to the trash bin. Art only has meaning when created by a human. NOPE. An artists' "lived experience" is the main driver of art. NOPE. Art is meaning and only humans can communicate meaning. NOPE. All these arguments are largely sentimental as actual output seems to be leading. I can already foresee elitist art critics pondering for days over the meaning of a piece, whilst sipping their wine. Whilst "the piece" is a guy in a basement typing "pretty fantasy landscape, epic lighting".
- andsoitis 4y ago
  > I assume the jury was competent in being an art judge. At a state fair? According to their website, this is the bio of the Exhibition Judge 2022 (they only show one judge but maybe there are more?): "Dagny McKinley is the Executive Director of the Colorado New Play Festival. Prior to that, she served for four years as Director of Development and Communications for Steamboat Creates. She is an author and photographer with five books to her credit. Her photography has been published across the United States. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University. Dagny currently serves on the Mineral Springs of Steamboat Springs Protection Committee with the Tread of Pioneers Museum, is on the Colorado Business Committee for the Arts advocacy committee, and is determined to see a performing art center in Steamboat Springs come to fruition. Dagny believes that anything can happen when you believe the impossible is possible." https://coloradostatefair.com/competitions/general-entry-fine-arts/fine-arts-exhibition/ https://coloradostatefair.com/competitions/general-entry-fin...
- soneca 4y ago
  I debate that a prize (decided by an art “judge”) represents anything of matter for the value of an art piece. Gatekeepers, curators and prizes are marketing tools, not necessarily relevant to the value of art. They are necessary for promoting art creation, that’s where their value is. They are not relevant, IMO, for attributing value to art.
ourmandave 4y ago
Left unanswered: Did they hang a copy on the IoT fridge?
snarfy 4y ago
> In some applications, photography replaced more laborious illustration methods (such as engraving), but human fine art painters are still around today. Yes, they are still around, but they are not employed to the degree they were before the invention of the camera. The same happened with recorded audio and live musicians. It's disruptive technology. People still do it, but it's not their day job.
- StingyJelly 4y ago
  Most people have day jobs they are better at instead - it's still a day job for the most talented/dedicated. Great photographers and modern musicians would have likely been mediocre painters / live musicians.
wnkrshm 4y ago
Pretty much all of knowledge work is on the table, I feel - this is a litmus test for how any other profession will be treated by the public eye in the future. With art, maybe artisans will get more work since people may want their picture to be made into reality (mostly with photorealistic objects that were generated).
JofArnold 4y ago
Here's my thoughts from Twitter a while back and judging by the comments I'm reading, hopefully they'll be valuable/interesting here too: From an "art" perspective DALL-E, Imagen, Midjourney bring little if anything new to the table...Not to say they aren't incredible, but "making art with words" has been well-explored for a century: Duchamp's "Unhappy Ready-made" in 1919 is one example, Moholy-Nagy's "Telephone Picture" https://www.moma.org/collection/works/147626 https://www.moma.org/collection/works/147626 is another. Indeed are these AIs any different from conceptual artists outsourcing their work to other humans? I don't think so. What I _am_ seeing from various conversations, though, is that they are game-changers when it comes to inspiring people to create, and to read and think about art history and philosophy. And that has to be a good thing.
password54321 4y ago
This may be answered many times already but how do we know for sure the image produced hasn't severely overfit to an image it was trained on?
motohagiography 4y ago
Funny, but also, the reliability of art as an honest signal of elevated human work, skill, insight, or experience is like an arbitrage everyone piles into to reap the benefits, and then it no longer represents what it initially did. It's like how we mostly produce music instead of perform it now, where you don't have to spend years becoming a skilled musician to produce music - and so it's not as rare, exceptional, or valuable anymore. Everything loses value/meaning over time, and art that represents a value from a prior time will have lost most of it's meaning. This is kind of what po-mo theory was about, where people can't tell the difference between the real and represented, what a copies of a copy are, and the relativity of individual experience. AI art is a kind of perfection or demonstration of some of that criticism. What AI art does is use recombinations of existing inputs to produce new symbols that are internally consistent with themselves, and they are only meaningful to us because a) we have accepted the input symbols as premises, and b) we have trained it on our beliefs about consistency that reinforce our beliefs about those symbols. The product of these models not so much "real" as they are just iterations over a finite symbol space. They are artifacts of the logic of an idea. However, it may be more powerful than we expected, as it's also a perfect meta-criticism for evaluating critical theories, most of which originated (ironically) in literary and art criticism. This dynamic is why you can use ML to produce papers in "theory" that are indistinguishable from acadeimc writing, because these, too, are not honest signals of elevated human thinking or skill, but rather, just self-referential, interally consistent artifacts of ideology whose only bearing on human experience is what we assign to it. Like AI art, they are not an indicator for reality. We can use them to model reality, but confusing the model with the real is full of some pretty subtle tricks. Anyway, it yields a pretty funny tautology that shows the limits of both art and theory, where arguably, to coin a deepity, if you can simulate it - it's not real.
password54321 4y ago
The title is trying to get rise out of everyone. It is more like: Human using AI as a tool to generate art to win contest annoys some people on Twitter.
- fleddr 4y ago
  Yes, and said "artists" seem to be specialized in doodling neon purple monkeys.
nephrite 4y ago
Humans created machines to do various work: to lift heavy weights, to go really fast, to fly, to float on water etc etc. It's not surprising that humans created machines that calculate real precisely, then machines that play chess and finally machines that create art. No surprises here. However, competitions have other purpose. I can easily "outrun" any marathon champion using a car (or even a bicycle... maybe). Will they admit me into marathon on a car? Of course not. I must run myself. So this case is real easy - the man was cheating and should return the prize.
- mandmandam 4y ago
  > this case is real easy - the man was cheating and should return the prize. Nope. He was upfront and honest before during and after the competition about his methods. This has been made clear in every article about this, as well as in this thread itself. People keep missing this point and it's irritating. "Allen said that he made clear that his artwork was generated with Midjourney, an online AI art tool, when he was dropping off his artwork and in his narrative submission. Olga Robak, the director of communications with the Colorado Department of Agriculture, confirmed that Allen mentioned Midjourney in his submission statement. According to fair rules, anybody can file a grievance against submitted items — but they will need to post a $300 bond, cite specific rules that have been broken and present a grievance letter in person. The bond can be returned if the grievance leads to a violation of the rules but Robak said a preliminary review showed Allen had not broken any."
- wilsonnb3 4y ago
  > Will they admit me into marathon on a car? Presumably the rules of the marathon say somewhere that you have to compete on foot. If they don't, then yeah you should bring a car or a plane or a horse. If you care about this sort of thing, just put 'no AI powered tools' in your art contest rules in the future and you will be good to go.
wseqyrku 4y ago
I think at its core the difference is in that the art is not created and polished by the author, it was just chosen and possibly tuned, that is, it's not the product of the author's imagination and emotions, it's only about taste and skills. This definitely needs its own competition but I'm not in a position to suggest it's not fair or how to regulate it.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
Hasn't AI just helped reveal that king is naked, art connoisseurs are just snobs, and in a blind test they can't distinguish between bad and good "art"?
swayvil 4y ago
Dim, narrow and low-rez. That characterizes the average appreciation of art. So when they say it's art. Or it's good or bad art. It really doesn't mean anything at all. Artists are pretty special in their ability to understand and appreciate (and do) art. They're like a different species.
mobiuscog 4y ago
We just need AI to judge the competitions, then we have gone full circle.

206 points by yreg 4y ago

AI is supposed to make our life easier not harder. In the second case we may not need it.

> 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. I think this settles the matter. It's not as if the camera or the AI registered themselves to the art contest and submitted their work. A tool is a tool. Of course we can limit which tools are allowed, as there are car races, horse races and bicycle races. Maybe there are no Photoshop art contests.

yreg 4y ago
I'm convinced that in a few years all digital artists are going to use these models as a part of their workflow, perhaps directly integrated into their graphic editors.
- Farow 4y ago
  Someone already made a Stable Diffusion extension for Photoshop: https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wyduk1/show_rstablediffusion_integrating_sd_in_photoshop/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wyduk1/sho...
  - danielbln 4y ago
    There are also plugins in the work for Krita and Gimp: https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/x209sb/preview_of_next_feature_of_my_stable_diffusion/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/x209sb/pre... https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wzfohj/wip_stable_diffusion_plugin_for_gimp/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wzfohj/wip...
- MathYouF 4y ago
  The team I work on is building tooling with exactly that in mind, making this a part of an artists workflow rather than any sort of replacement.
westoncb 4y ago
The situation with AI art is significantly complicated by the fact that we can't easily distinguish between works produced with vs. without it; with cameras/photography that wasn't as much of an issue, which prevented it from being a true encroachment (not to mention the potential subject matter of photography is a small subset of what's more generally possible in human-created art)—with AI art toes and much more will be stepped on and people will be pissed. (Photoshop I see as a separate issue; people take it better because it still resembles traditional methods to such a large degree.)
- px43 4y ago
  > we can't easily distinguish between works produced with vs. without it If you've played with any of these tools for 5-10 minutes, you'll know what to look for to quickly identify purely generated images. Have a look at some of these people https://thispersondoesnotexist.com https://thispersondoesnotexist.com After flicking through 10 or so of these, you'll start to become more sensitive to the subtle inconsistencies in symmetry, colors, and the unnatural way high contrast transitions take place, etc, and it's the same with anything that comes out of any of these art generating tools. With time, those particular aberrations can be smoothed over, but I think it's kind of like how when we saw Jurassic Park in 1995, lots of people were blown away about the realism of the dinosaurs, but when you watch it now, they just seem like plastic toy figures. Over time, we've become more sensitive to recognizing computer generated animations. Subtle issues with lighting, hair, shadows, etc. When new technology comes out, it takes some time to recognize how to spot these quirks, but over time it becomes pretty obvious. I see some amazing artists using midjourney etc, and then clipping together fragments and painting over them using classic digital art tooling, with some astounding results. As with any artistic tooling technology, the real winners are going to be the artists that learn to embrace the tech.
  - forgotpwd16 4y ago
    Someone should make an AI that finds out whether a work is AI generated.
  - westoncb 4y ago

dlkf 4y ago

”The camera will never compete with the brush and palette until such time as photography can be taken to Heaven or Hell.” - Edvard Munch

lioeters 4y ago
I think machine learning is getting closer to photographing heaven or hell, capturing images from the imaginary realm of all possible images.
- dlkf 4y ago
  I don’t think you understand what Munch meant.
  - gjm11 4y ago
    What do you think Munch meant? I don't know whether there's more context for his quip that makes its meaning more explicit, but it looks to me as if it means: the painter, unlike the camera, is not limited to neutral depiction of actually visible things; a painting can be fantastical (showing some imagined heaven or hell) or can convey emotion as well as literal photons (enabling the viewer to share the artist's own internal heaven or hell). lioeter's comment focuses on the first of those unphotographic possibilities, and as far as that goes it's clearly correct: AI systems like DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion are able to make depictions of things that don't actually exist, so that limitation of the camera has been transcended. But the same is happening to the second too. Mundanely, if you ask DALL-E for "a man standing on a bridge, expressing ..." you get quite different (and, I think, appropriate) results depending on whether you finish it with "horror, dismay, and misery" or "contentment, excitement, and joy". But that's also true if instead of "a man standing on a bridge" you put "abstract impressionist painting of a city". These systems do in fact know something about mood and atmosphere and emotion, in the sense that if you ask them for joy or misery they do produce images that communicate some degree of joy or misery. (At least sometimes. I tried asking DALL-E for "abstract impressionist painting of a man on a bridge by a fjord at sunset, expressing ..." and I can't say it made the "joy" ones any more joyful or less miserable than the "misery" ones. Same with "post-impressionist oil painting ...". I tried the same with Stable Diffusion and it also didn't really manage. Score one for Edvard Munch.) They don't seem anywhere close to being able to do that as well as human artists can, though maybe someone more skilled with prompt engineering than I am could get much better results. But they're heading in that direction.

NicoleJO 4y ago

This is yet another article that misses the point, which that these art generators create images from stolen copyrighted art on the web. None of the winning piece belonged to the winner!

Kiro 4y ago
If you think everyone is consistently missing the point, then maybe your point is not what people actually care about.
- qu4z-2 4y ago
  I mean, that's just tautological, kinda.
- mandmandam 4y ago
  To be fair, many people are missing many points on this issue. People miss that the tech is here, and it's not going away. We've open sourced it already. It's burgeoning at a wild speed. Most people seem to miss that this artist was entirely honest about his use of AI assistance. Many are missing the point that this was a casual art competition; a state fair. There wasn't a huge prize at stake. Many are missing the fact that there was undeniably artistry in the methods used, including weeks of work, touch ups with Photoshop, etc. I doubt that one in 100 people could get a work like this from MidJourney even given a week of unlimited research and experimentation. People don't care about these issues. It's ignorance. Trying to have a fruitful discussion on this stuff when basic facts are left by the wayside is like trying to drink water with a fork.
- NicoleJO 4y ago
  I inadvertently excluded the news, which has thus far been smart enough to address the issue.
yreg 4y ago
Creating derivative works, getting inspired and stealing styles and ideas is a cornerstone of art, present throughout all of its history.
4y ago

ghusto 4y ago

This only re-enforces what I already believe; that most critics — and especially art critics — mistake what they don't understand for deeper meaning. There is a snobbery in the art world that arises from a lack of self-confidence, resulting in an emperors-new-clothes situation. So an image like this — which by the way, I will admit I find on some level beautiful and interesting to look at — which doesn't have any intention behind it, is thought to probably be be some kind of deep art.

bilekas 4y ago
I'm inclined to agree. I like the image, its pleasing to me. So that's all I personally care for. There seems to be a debate though over 'what is art?' more-so than anything else as alluded to in the article : > 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. For me the question is moot.
- tommiegannert 4y ago
  > There seems to be a debate though over 'what is art?' The question matters deeply to those trying to make art tradeable. Their business is about maintaining scarcity (a.k.a. non-fungibility), so they'll spend up to some portion of their profit margins on gatekeeping and defending terminology.
  - fbn79 4y ago
    Making a parallelism with Fountain by "Duchamp". Duchamp is the Artist not the company that designed and produced the urinal. The same way the Artist is the person that summoned the AI to get that picture.
    - beardyw 4y ago
      Fountain very particularly didn't try to be something it wasn't and didn't win a prize. It was genuinely disruptive to the concept of what is art. This is almost the opposite - something folks here say they would hang on their wall. But that would apply if it was a copy of someone else's picture. To some extent that is what it is. Not sure in that case it should win a prize.

svsoc 4y ago

I have no stance on whether this is good/ethical/art at all but given all the "it's obvious that these images are by an AI", "so called AI art doesn't have soul and that's why people won't use it" or "it can't compete with real human art" takes of late it was kind of refreshing to see someone make this point.

brontosaurusrex 4y ago
Is it made by an ai? Or is a fusion of stuff it found online? If 2nd, then is the piece produced anything else than forgery? (No idea personally, but I do like the disruptive element of it all).
- dagw 4y ago
  'remixing' existing works into your own creation is both well established an accepted within the art world. Nobody would consider it forgery to do that.
  - brontosaurusrex 4y ago
    The art world? So we are just fine with 'empty' aesthetics? (that is disruptive) So the new definition of art would be: 'a human/ai product of any kind, be it remix or whatever you can sell as art'.
    - dagw 4y ago
      Personally I take a rather maximalist definition of art. If you self-identify as an artist and do something with the sole intention of it being art, then it is art. It can be ugly, boring, derivative, uninspiring and trivial, none of that makes it any less 'art', it just makes it bad art.

femto113 4y ago

This guy should return the prize and apologize for deceiving the judges. The rules state: "All items entered for the competition must be entered in the name of the person who created the entry." If Allen had hired 100 humans to create images based on his prompt, and then submitted his favorite of those under his name I don't think anyone would consider that legitimate. IMO having Midjourney generate 100 images is no different: Allen did not "create" this art, it was created by Midjourney (and by proxy, by all of the artists it trained on).

yreg 4y ago
"Allen said that he made clear that his artwork was generated with Midjourney, an online AI art tool, when he was dropping off his artwork and in his narrative submission. Olga Robak, the director of communications with the Colorado Department of Agriculture, confirmed that Allen mentioned Midjourney in his submission statement. According to fair rules, anybody can file a grievance against submitted items — but they will need to post a $300 bond, cite specific rules that have been broken and present a grievance letter in person. The bond can be returned if the grievance leads to a violation of the rules but Robak said a preliminary review showed Allen had not broken any." — https://eu.chieftain.com/story/news/2022/08/31/ai-painting-wins-at-colorado-state-fair-pueblo-artist-explains-jason-allen/65466872007/ https://eu.chieftain.com/story/news/2022/08/31/ai-painting-w...
- Jarmsy 4y ago
  That "an online AI art tool" in the first sentence is potentially misleading, as the clarification is being made in this article, but this clarification was not made by the artist at the time. He said (in the Midjourney Discord) that when submitting he "stated that he made them via Midjourney", but it sounds like he didn't make clear that this was an AI tool. Sincarnate — 26/08/2022 Yes the description clearly stated I created them via Midjourney starshadowx2 — 26/08/2022 Was it explained what Midjourney was though Sincarnate — 26/08/2022 This is why I did it. Should I have explained what Midjourney was? If so, why? He also mentions that he originally mentioned Midjourney in the caption, but didn't correct them when they edited that part out. I think these sorts of details do matter.

dcastm 4y ago

Note that the guy who submitted the images to the contest created hundreds of images, and spent weeks finetuning the prompts and curating the results. Midjourney/Stable Diffusion/DALLE are doing to Photoshop what it did to traditional drawing methods. But there's still a human in the loop.

hourago 4y ago
> Note that the guy who submitted the images to the contest created hundreds of images, and spent weeks finetuning the prompts and curating the results. Let a monkey write for a million years and choose the best writing. I think that currently AI is better than that, but not so far as to be a misleading comparation.
- danogentili 4y ago
  Why the downvotes? This is the perfect analogy :)
- tromp 4y ago
  If the monkey only has 10% chance to pick each word appropriately, then in a million years of picking one word per second, you expect only 14 consecutive appropriate words. To get just 100 consecutive appropriate words would take the monkey 10^100 seconds, or over 10^83 billion years...
mid-kid 4y ago
This. People are saying an AI made it, but it sure as hell couldn't have without serious time and effort by the author.
Last5Digits 4y ago
There is still a human in the loop for now, but I'd wager a guess that this won't be the case for long. A lot of the "humans will still be needed" arguments implicitly rely on the assumption that the trend of AI progress stops here. The original DALL-E was released just a year ago. In one year, AI image generation went from generating images that looked slightly normal if you squinted really hard, to the beautiful, detailed and creative results we see today. The same speed of progress can be observed in almost all other domains, from code generation to question answering and music synthesis. For many of these problems, it almost feels like the next step up in quality is just two hours of planning and a couple months of training away. Like they're already solved and just waiting for someone to implement the solution. So yeah, humans are still needed right now. But I wouldn't base my hopes for the future on that, because the world of AI capabilities will probably look very different in just one year.

reacharavindh 4y ago

Does anybody know if it is possible to get a high res image of this art? I would love to print it and hang it in my office…

in3d 4y ago

What struck me when reading through many outraged tweets of artists was how it was all about the rules, copyright, the art critics, the other artists, the financial aspects, and most of all personal attacks on the submitter. Nobody gave a damn about the art consumers and their preferences. Sure, it probably should become a separate category in competitions and it could suck for lower-level artists. But it makes me think that this whole industry needs a realignment.

salawat 4y ago
>But it makes me think that this whole industry needs a realignment. Truer words have never before been spoken. However, I think it applies more to the tech industry than the Art world.
esperent 4y ago
In the context of an art competition those are all reasonable arguments. For a competition between humans to be meaningful, there have to be artificial constraints put in place. For a weightlifting competition, those constraints are things like "don't use steroids" and "don't use an invisible string to assist you in lifting the weights". For an art competition, the constraints might be things like "don't use AI to generate the image" or "don't hire another artist to do the work for you". In all of these cases, breaking the constraints is still work. Using steroids is dangerous and may be illegal. Hiring another artist is time consuming and expensive. Getting good results from an AI model takes many iterations and a lot of tweaking. If you just care about the result then it doesn't matter how the heavy lumps of metal were lifted, or who created the aesthetically pleasing artwork. But if you care about the competition, then these constraints are important.
- fjkdlsjflkds 4y ago
  > For an art competition, the constraints might be things like "don't use AI to generate the image" [...] This is a good point. But... 1) Was that actually explicitly stated as a constraint in this specific art competition? If not, then no (explicit) rules were broken, I guess. 2) Unlike rules such as "don't use steroids" (which can be enforced through testing), it might be more complicated to effectively enforce rules such as "don't use AI to generate the image": even if you assume some perfect "watermarking" process (that would mark an image as "AI-generated" vs. "human-generated"), nothing prevents a person from indirectly using AI in the generation of digital art (e.g., prompt -> generate image using AI -> paint over image using pbrush.exe, deleting all watermarks in the process). My point: though you make a fair point, rules that cannot be effectively enforced can be seen as somewhat unfair (since they only affect honest people).

taylorius 4y ago

This is clearly the death of art as we know it. By removing any and all skill from the process of creation, it inevitably renders the creation worthless.

dagw 4y ago
We've been through "the death of art as we know it" so many times throughout history already and art has always continued to grow and flourish. I fail to see why this time should be any different.
PeterisP 4y ago
Obviously the creation was not worthless for many people, they enjoyed the picture very much. Perhaps it's an indication (or a reminder!) that for most people the worth of a piece of art does not depend on the skill or the process of creation, but mostly on the esthetics of the outcome; it's the death of a specific aspect of art which is the focus of art critics and some of the artists, but can be ignored by the 'art consumers'.
- taylorius 4y ago
  >it's the death of a specific aspect of art which is the focus of art critics and some of the artists, but can be ignored by the 'art consumers'. Fair enough, I'd agree with that - but I think there is no-one left but "art consumers". One could imagine a version of instagram, where the user could scroll through pages of images, all of which were generated by AI. Is that user of Instagram then an artist if they pick a favourite? If I scroll through real instagram and pick a favourite, am I now an artist?
fleddr 4y ago
No, it doesn't. Output is value, not input. When you look at a high-end photo that you like, one of perhaps hundreds that you see in a day, do you do a detailed background check on the input? Explore the "life experience" of the photographer? Try to guess some deeper meaning? Study the technical approach and gear used, in order to come to the ultimate appreciation of how this outcome came to be? No, you don't. You look at it for 2 secs, go "nice picture" and move on.

SMAAART 4y ago

Technology is disruptive, and the Art world is not immune to disruption by tech. Similar arguments were made about 100 years ago when photography entered the Art world.

TheAceOfHearts 4y ago

The best comment on this issue that I've heard so far[0]: > Out: Art that makes the public mad by deconstructing the idea of art > In: Art that makes artists mad by deconstructing the idea of artist There's space for various forms of art competition. You could have pure competitions with stricter constraints on what is or isn't allowed. I love that humanity has developed so many new highly advanced tools which allow greater artistic expression by a broader range of people. The creation of the synthesizer didn't kill the guitar, it just opened the door to a whole new world of musical expression. If I wanted to capitalize on the AI craze that's currently happening I'd host an AI-generated art competition / exibition. I'm surprised nobody from the companies that are developing these AI tools has tried doing that. It would be really interesting to see what kinds of works people are coming up with after investing dozens or hundreds of hours into these AI tools. I suspect a lot of AI artwork will end up looking kinda same-y after a while, but a few people will figure out how to hack around with prompt engineering to get really interesting and unique results. [0] https://twitter.com/C_Harwick/status/1564948225781555202 https://twitter.com/C_Harwick/status/1564948225781555202

mistrial9 4y ago
> The creation of the synthesizer compare music as played in a cultural setting, say 100 years ago. and the avalanche of dance tracks in the last thirty years (ravers, you are not invited to do this test). Honestly tell me that creatively nothing is lost in musical arts.
- esrauch 4y ago
  Except people said the same thing in 1970 compared to 1870 when there was essentially no digital influence on art in 1970. Compared to the 1800s, art has been pushed towards things that are "simpler" in all areas and it's not because of digitalization. Rothko didn't happen because of a bucket fill tool.
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    > art has been pushed towards things that are "simpler" in all areas This can't be true for still images. Not only the quantity of art being produced by digital means but the variation and quality has exploded since the democratization of digital painting. Certain styles are in vogue but there are countless examples of wild experimentation. Technical ability also seems greatly enhanced by these tools. Add to that all of the forms that weren't even possible 30 years ago and I strongly doubt we are in any way losing variety or quality in art. Maybe the sheer quantity is the problem, it's harder to find the really great art amongst the ever expanding ocean of generic art.

klrtank 4y ago

Kamq 4y ago
I'd totally buy a copy of it explicitly because it made a bunch of art judges look like fools.

gonzo41 4y ago

I like the image. However, it looks like an oil painting, but I think it's a print stretched on canvas like you see in coffee shops. So it's a digital creation. Whilst not any less of a way to create art. I like classical mediums, including photography (not digital). I think the physical human work of making the art is an important part of what makes something art. I don't discount digital art at all. I just like the older mediums. Anyway, that's just my opinion and I think making nice pictures is a good enough reason to do anything. The creation is the point. Anyway, good for the owner of the AI who created it?

kamranjon 4y ago
What is your take on the similarity to the advent of photography? It was mentioned in the article that photography was similarly criticized for removing much of the work involved in painting by hand.
- gonzo41 4y ago
  I like and approve of analogue photography. I don't really like digital. It makes most images now. But large format photography is a challenge and requires a lot of skill, you have to get it right there at the moment of capture. There's something real about having been in a place, and done a physical thing to record a moment in a way. Digital just...everything's filtered... nothing feels real. And whilst you can do a LOT of darkroom tricks like slicing two negatives together and using filters to highlight things, there's a limit. But again, It's what I like. Some will agree, some will not. I'm happy with what I like and see stacks of digital art I just find myself more drawn to non digital stuff. It perhaps is a side effect of working with tech all day.
- forgotusername6 4y ago
  Photography of course evolved into an art discipline of its own. Along with it came billions of low effort terrible pictures. I'm expecting AI art to follow the same pattern. Amazing human lead compositions alongside generic pieces.
  - 4y ago

oh_my_goodness 4y ago

"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." Very tough business to make a living in now, though.

MontyCarloHall 4y ago
Very tough business to make a living in back then, too.
- oh_my_goodness 4y ago
  Yeah. I'm curious whether photography made it harder to make a living as an artist, or whether it was always very tough and photography didn't make much difference.

YetAnotherNick 4y ago

I was browsing the contest site and came across the description of the judge for the contest. I couldn't laugh harder. Have you had a dream where it felt as if it was real? Do you feel the earth guide you to something that feels right? Have you felt a portal of some distant reality exist alongside of us? Art has been a portal to channel my indigenous ancestors, where I slip under an emotional spinning vortex of creation. The makers of my blood flow through me. I channel the artisans, craft-makers, mud-dwellers, star-makers, dream-weavers and earth-brothers and sisters — the ones who paved the way and forged the path. My work carries spirit and my truth is in everything I create. [0]: https://coloradostatefair.com/competitions/general-entry-fine-arts/fine-arts-exhibition/ https://coloradostatefair.com/competitions/general-entry-fin...

wrp 4y ago

This is an occasion to remind folks of Harold Cohen's AARON, over which much ink has been spilled. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARON)

gchamonlive 4y ago

Maybe the future is not that bleak. I would love to see A.I. take over strictly commercial art. And paradoxically enough, this is NOT the case here. Yes, A.I. generated the finalist image, but WE as humans make that art. The picture is sterile up until the very moment it sparks social discussions as it is doing right now. A.I. overtaking jobs is a very human subject. It does not matter how much A.I. evolve, art will only become art if appreciated by humans. Even when A.I. evolve enough to be in a level self-evolving and be influenced by art, their needs will be different from ours, and we will still maintain control over how art impact us. What we are seeing is not the death of art, but a flaw in our social system, with the livelihood and dignity of individuals being directly tied to their functional importance to society, like cogs in a machine. That is what I think we need to attack. For all things art, I hope A.I. will help us divorce from the insidious form of commercial art and leave us time to focus on actual art that usher positive social change. An interesting take on that is in Marcuse's One Dimensional Man.

isolli 4y ago

> 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. Isn't it photography that prompted painters to explore other forms of painting like impressionism (eventually with great success)? I wonder what the current wave of technical innovations might trigger in terms of artistic expression...

rvz 4y ago

This is exactly why we need detectors for this sort of technology. Like with DeepFake detectors there should also be detectors for DALL-E 2, Stability AI, etc. The whole technology (especially AI technology, Deep Learning) is a dystopian creation and nothing good comes out of it. As for this art contest, I would just disqualify digital art all together and only allow hard copy, physical oil on canvas paintings. (And no, not a printed copy)

fleddr 4y ago
Not going to happen. Already advanced AI authors combine many tools. They may use their own image/photos as input (which is non-AI), combine with AI, compose objects/layers, fine-tune, inpaint, outpaint, text inversion and that's about a single week of progress. You can't stop this even if you tried.
- rvz 4y ago
  > You can't stop this even if you tried. Who said stop? I said 'detect'. DeepFakes have detectors, there are GPT-3 detectors already being developed and the same will happen with DALL-E 2 / Stable Diffusion. I won't be surprised to see someone develop such a detector for both of these AI tools as a research project.
  - fleddr 4y ago
    It depends on what you mean, detection of specifically a deep fake, or the detection of AI involvement in image creation in general? Detection of a deepfake, for example a generated photo of a person of something that never actually happened, may be in the real of possibilities, but still difficult. Detection of AI in an artistic image? Not a chance.

fleddr 4y ago

Yes, you can debate the fairness angle. But an important angle is missed here. Apparently, this output, in whichever way it was constructed, was favored. Maybe it's just pretty, maybe it emotes, maybe it communicates something very well. I don't know, but I assume the jury was competent in being an art judge. My point is that this redirects a lot of talking points by artists to the trash bin. Art only has meaning when created by a human. NOPE. An artists' "lived experience" is the main driver of art. NOPE. Art is meaning and only humans can communicate meaning. NOPE. All these arguments are largely sentimental as actual output seems to be leading. I can already foresee elitist art critics pondering for days over the meaning of a piece, whilst sipping their wine. Whilst "the piece" is a guy in a basement typing "pretty fantasy landscape, epic lighting".

andsoitis 4y ago
> I assume the jury was competent in being an art judge. At a state fair? According to their website, this is the bio of the Exhibition Judge 2022 (they only show one judge but maybe there are more?): "Dagny McKinley is the Executive Director of the Colorado New Play Festival. Prior to that, she served for four years as Director of Development and Communications for Steamboat Creates. She is an author and photographer with five books to her credit. Her photography has been published across the United States. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University. Dagny currently serves on the Mineral Springs of Steamboat Springs Protection Committee with the Tread of Pioneers Museum, is on the Colorado Business Committee for the Arts advocacy committee, and is determined to see a performing art center in Steamboat Springs come to fruition. Dagny believes that anything can happen when you believe the impossible is possible." https://coloradostatefair.com/competitions/general-entry-fine-arts/fine-arts-exhibition/ https://coloradostatefair.com/competitions/general-entry-fin...
soneca 4y ago
I debate that a prize (decided by an art “judge”) represents anything of matter for the value of an art piece. Gatekeepers, curators and prizes are marketing tools, not necessarily relevant to the value of art. They are necessary for promoting art creation, that’s where their value is. They are not relevant, IMO, for attributing value to art.

ourmandave 4y ago

Left unanswered: Did they hang a copy on the IoT fridge?

snarfy 4y ago

> In some applications, photography replaced more laborious illustration methods (such as engraving), but human fine art painters are still around today. Yes, they are still around, but they are not employed to the degree they were before the invention of the camera. The same happened with recorded audio and live musicians. It's disruptive technology. People still do it, but it's not their day job.

StingyJelly 4y ago
Most people have day jobs they are better at instead - it's still a day job for the most talented/dedicated. Great photographers and modern musicians would have likely been mediocre painters / live musicians.

wnkrshm 4y ago

Pretty much all of knowledge work is on the table, I feel - this is a litmus test for how any other profession will be treated by the public eye in the future. With art, maybe artisans will get more work since people may want their picture to be made into reality (mostly with photorealistic objects that were generated).

JofArnold 4y ago

Here's my thoughts from Twitter a while back and judging by the comments I'm reading, hopefully they'll be valuable/interesting here too: From an "art" perspective DALL-E, Imagen, Midjourney bring little if anything new to the table...Not to say they aren't incredible, but "making art with words" has been well-explored for a century: Duchamp's "Unhappy Ready-made" in 1919 is one example, Moholy-Nagy's "Telephone Picture" https://www.moma.org/collection/works/147626 https://www.moma.org/collection/works/147626 is another. Indeed are these AIs any different from conceptual artists outsourcing their work to other humans? I don't think so. What I _am_ seeing from various conversations, though, is that they are game-changers when it comes to inspiring people to create, and to read and think about art history and philosophy. And that has to be a good thing.

password54321 4y ago

This may be answered many times already but how do we know for sure the image produced hasn't severely overfit to an image it was trained on?

motohagiography 4y ago

Funny, but also, the reliability of art as an honest signal of elevated human work, skill, insight, or experience is like an arbitrage everyone piles into to reap the benefits, and then it no longer represents what it initially did. It's like how we mostly produce music instead of perform it now, where you don't have to spend years becoming a skilled musician to produce music - and so it's not as rare, exceptional, or valuable anymore. Everything loses value/meaning over time, and art that represents a value from a prior time will have lost most of it's meaning. This is kind of what po-mo theory was about, where people can't tell the difference between the real and represented, what a copies of a copy are, and the relativity of individual experience. AI art is a kind of perfection or demonstration of some of that criticism. What AI art does is use recombinations of existing inputs to produce new symbols that are internally consistent with themselves, and they are only meaningful to us because a) we have accepted the input symbols as premises, and b) we have trained it on our beliefs about consistency that reinforce our beliefs about those symbols. The product of these models not so much "real" as they are just iterations over a finite symbol space. They are artifacts of the logic of an idea. However, it may be more powerful than we expected, as it's also a perfect meta-criticism for evaluating critical theories, most of which originated (ironically) in literary and art criticism. This dynamic is why you can use ML to produce papers in "theory" that are indistinguishable from acadeimc writing, because these, too, are not honest signals of elevated human thinking or skill, but rather, just self-referential, interally consistent artifacts of ideology whose only bearing on human experience is what we assign to it. Like AI art, they are not an indicator for reality. We can use them to model reality, but confusing the model with the real is full of some pretty subtle tricks. Anyway, it yields a pretty funny tautology that shows the limits of both art and theory, where arguably, to coin a deepity, if you can simulate it - it's not real.

password54321 4y ago

The title is trying to get rise out of everyone. It is more like: Human using AI as a tool to generate art to win contest annoys some people on Twitter.

fleddr 4y ago
Yes, and said "artists" seem to be specialized in doodling neon purple monkeys.

nephrite 4y ago

Humans created machines to do various work: to lift heavy weights, to go really fast, to fly, to float on water etc etc. It's not surprising that humans created machines that calculate real precisely, then machines that play chess and finally machines that create art. No surprises here. However, competitions have other purpose. I can easily "outrun" any marathon champion using a car (or even a bicycle... maybe). Will they admit me into marathon on a car? Of course not. I must run myself. So this case is real easy - the man was cheating and should return the prize.

mandmandam 4y ago
> this case is real easy - the man was cheating and should return the prize. Nope. He was upfront and honest before during and after the competition about his methods. This has been made clear in every article about this, as well as in this thread itself. People keep missing this point and it's irritating. "Allen said that he made clear that his artwork was generated with Midjourney, an online AI art tool, when he was dropping off his artwork and in his narrative submission. Olga Robak, the director of communications with the Colorado Department of Agriculture, confirmed that Allen mentioned Midjourney in his submission statement. According to fair rules, anybody can file a grievance against submitted items — but they will need to post a $300 bond, cite specific rules that have been broken and present a grievance letter in person. The bond can be returned if the grievance leads to a violation of the rules but Robak said a preliminary review showed Allen had not broken any."
wilsonnb3 4y ago
> Will they admit me into marathon on a car? Presumably the rules of the marathon say somewhere that you have to compete on foot. If they don't, then yeah you should bring a car or a plane or a horse. If you care about this sort of thing, just put 'no AI powered tools' in your art contest rules in the future and you will be good to go.

wseqyrku 4y ago

I think at its core the difference is in that the art is not created and polished by the author, it was just chosen and possibly tuned, that is, it's not the product of the author's imagination and emotions, it's only about taste and skills. This definitely needs its own competition but I'm not in a position to suggest it's not fair or how to regulate it.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago

Hasn't AI just helped reveal that king is naked, art connoisseurs are just snobs, and in a blind test they can't distinguish between bad and good "art"?

swayvil 4y ago

Dim, narrow and low-rez. That characterizes the average appreciation of art. So when they say it's art. Or it's good or bad art. It really doesn't mean anything at all. Artists are pretty special in their ability to understand and appreciate (and do) art. They're like a different species.

mobiuscog 4y ago

We just need AI to judge the competitions, then we have gone full circle.