Artist uses AI-generated art to win in competition, and Twitter isn’t happy

As per a report by Vice, the incident involved Allen winning the Colorado State Fair competition under the Digital Arts / Digitally-Manipulated Photography section, and flaunting his win on Discord, following which Allen received a lot of criticism. The piece was called “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial” and was created using AI software Midjourney, based on Allen’s prompts.

A tweet by user OmniMorpho (@OmniMorpho) even calls the art piece an example of “watching the death of artistry right before our eyes.” While the win may seem like an unfair one at first to many, it still qualifies in the Digitally-Manipulated Photography section, making Allen’s win a legit one, at least for the judges.

We’re watching the death of artistry unfold right before our eyes — if creative jobs aren’t safe from machines, then even high-skilled jobs are in danger of becoming obsolete
What will we have then?

— OmniMorpho (@OmniMorpho) August 31, 2022

Allen, meanwhile, reportedly responded to the negative comments in the Midjourney Discord server on Tuesday, mentioning how “people on Twitter who are against AI generated art are the first ones to throw the human under the bus by discrediting the human element.”

The creator insisted that his input was a key part of the final piece that won the prize, and also mentions that his work was submitted to the state fair competition as “Jason Allen via Midjourney.”

“I have been exploring a special prompt that I will be publishing at a later date, I have created 100s of images using it, and after many weeks of fine tuning and curating my gens, I chose my top 3 and had them printed on canvas after unshackling with Gigapixel AI,” he wrote in a post ahead of the winners announcement.