AIs are Ruining Everything Part 2: What Is Art?

Move over Picasso. Skynet has entered the art field and has the ability to win over human artists. In a strange turn of events, art created by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) artbot was entered into a contest and actually won - beating human artists with pieces entered in a variety of mediums.

The work titled "Theatre D'opera Spatial" (also known as the Space Opera Theater) was entered by Jason M. Allen into the Colorado State Fair in August of this year. Allen used an AI program known as Midjourney that turns text into graphics. The AI produced by Midjourney is open source and relatively new, reaching its beta phase earlier this year. The Midjourney AI is currently available online and has both free and paid tiers in case you were curious and wanted to see what an AI can do in terms of generating art.

In a previous blog post we mentioned that anything that learns via mathematical modeling, or well anything that learns in general, needs something to learn from. The Midjourney AI is no exception and was trained using real, human artists' works, which is why it has the ability to mimic what could be created by a person so well. It appears to have been given works in different mediums and styles as it is able to detect and generate hyper realistic images, painting-like images, and cartoons - even if not prompted to differentiate between mediums.

Given that information, Allen claims to have won fair and square since he had not technically broken any rules. The real question here is not "are AIs truly more human than human now?" but rather "what should and/or can be considered tools of a trade?" The use of an AI is not quite the same as using digital platforms such as ProCreate or Photoshop, but until recently there was not a need to strictly define digital media. When approached concerning his work, Allen has been generally unapologetic since he did follow the rules of the competition.

The two judges for his entered category were unaware that an AI generated the art, but state that even if they had known they still would have awarded Allen the top prize. Interestingly enough, both judges were artists themselves, so their decision to award first place is particularly interesting considering that each of them is trained in at least one craft. Was it right or wrong? Until an AI ethics group can take a look at this case and determine whether rules for contests need to include something about the use of AIs to generate media of any sort, Allen and people like him get a pass. 

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