Social media channels have been having a field day this week over the awarding of a prize to Colorado (USA) based gamer and emerging artist, Jason Allen – who has won first prize in the Colorado State Fair Fine Arts Competition with his work Théâtre D’opéra Spatial (French for Space Opera Theatre).
The winning work is an epic – almost allegorical scene – in which a group of figures in period costume look through a circular window onto a distant landscape.
The gripe is that this first time entrant has created his artwork using Midjourney, an artificial intelligence program that turns lines of text into hyper-realistic graphics. Allen estimated it took him around 80 hours to create the artwork.
While the US$300 (GBP258) prize is hardly a career making one, the global commentary around his work has definitely put his name on the map – to the point that media sources such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Aljazeera and Artnews have all joined the banter.
The noised kicked off with a social media post by digital artist Genel Jumalon who tweeted a screenshot from Allen’s gaming handle Sincarnate’s post, celebrating his win (on Midjourney’s Discord channel).
Jumalon’s post states: ‘Someone entered an art competition with an AI-generated piece and won the first prize. Yeah that’s pretty fucking shitty.’
Within hours Jumalon’s post had been liked more than 85,000 times.
In an interview with the Pueblo Chieftain, Allen said, ‘I wanted to make a statement using artificial intelligence artwork. I feel like I accomplished that, and I’m not going to apologise for it.’
So what does this win mean for digital art prizes moving forward, and more so, what does it mean for collecting practices?
A case for automated plagiarism
Partly, it is has been social media that has turned this into such a noisy topic.
Artists have long been working with digitally-aided generation of artworks. The stickler among the social conversation is that, unlike a digital tablet using drawing apps for example, this work is entirely created by algorithms.
Dr Mike Seymour, a lecturer at the University of Sydney Business School, is an internationally respected expert in digital humans and virtual production, and is facilitating the workshop ‘Design Thinking with DALL-E’ at DISRUPT.SYDNEY.
He has said of Allen’s win: ‘The issue of AI art may seem confronting, but the AI engine is just that: an engine. It makes no creative judgements – it does however respond to the “intent” of the operator, or in this case, the artist. It is directly down to that artist to know how to guide the AI, what changes to make, and when to stop and say: “I think this has artistic merit!”
He continued: ‘The question of the role of the artist in the artistic endeavour has been a much-discussed topic due to the AI-produced winning artwork, but frankly it has also been a key question in the art world for decades, if not longer.’
Seymour makes the point that art is the intent of the artist and the reaction of the viewer in a societal context.
‘By this account Théâtre D’opéra Spatial ticks all the boxes: it was produced with intent, it was received with an enormous emotional response, and in the context of our current thinking about AI – it is relevant,’ Seymour said in a statement.
I feel like, right now, the art community is heading into an existential crisis if it’s not already. A big factor of that is … the disruptive technology of open AI.
Jason Allen, winning AI artist and gamer
‘A lot of people are saying, “AI is never going to take over creative jobs, that’s never going to be something that artists and sculptors have to worry about”. And here we are smack in the middle of it, dealing with it right now,’ he told the Chieftan.
Drew Harwell writes for The Washington Post: ‘Text-to-image tools like DALL-E 2 and Midjourney have quickly increased in sophistication and become one of the hottest topics in AI. They can generate not just fake people, objects and locations but mimic entire visual styles.
‘Users can demand the art piece look like a cartoon storybook or a historical diagram or an Associated Press photograph, and the system will do its best to oblige.
But AI-generated art has been criticised as automated plagiarism, because it relies on millions of ingested art pieces that are then parroted en masse. It has also fuelled deeper fears: of decimating people’s creative work, blurring the boundaries of reality or smothering human art.
Drew Harwell, The Washington Post.
Many have argued that AI is just another tool, like a paintbrush or potter’s wheel, and that the push back is one based on fear and ignorance, rather than an embrace of expanded future practice.
The other camp – like Harwell suggests – is worried about copyright issues.
Midjourney has become one of the most popular AI art generators largely because it allows anyone to freely create new images on command. Using the prompt ‘/imagine,’ a user can type in whatever they want to see and the AI will return four newly created images in 60 seconds. The user can also ask the AI to improve, or ‘upscale,’ the visual quality with new variations on the same idea.
Yep, that sounds great – but whose images are the ones being collected and collated?
‘What makes this AI different is that it’s explicitly trained on current working artists, echoed digital artist RJ Palmer in a tweet last month. ‘This thing wants our jobs; its actively anti-artist.’
One of the problems is the lightening speed at which this technology is advancing, because copyright and controls can’t keep up.
While the art world might be grappling with today’s problem, these platforms have already created the next problem. And in terms of copyright law … well it remains in the Dark Ages if we are talking about commensurate action with its arrival on the market.
With a disapproving tone, Kevin Roose writes in The New York Times: ‘AI generated art has been around for years. But tools released this year – with names like DALL-E 2, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion – have made it possible for rank amateurs to create complex, abstract or photorealistic works simply by typing a few words into a text box.’
The reference here is ‘rank amateurs’.
Roose continues: ‘What makes the new breed of AI tools different, some critics believe, is not just that they’re capable of producing beautiful works of art with minimal effort. It’s how they work.’
He explained that these new programs scrape millions of images from the open web, and ‘then teaching algorithms to recognise patterns and relationships in those images and generate new ones in the same style. That means that artists who upload their works to the internet may be unwittingly helping to train their algorithmic competitors.’
Clearly, this topic is the tip of an iceberg worthy of a Titanic collision, and a subject to keep a close eye on.
