AI-generated artwork that won 1st prize stirs controversy

Since most people are unfamiliar with how text-to-image AI generators function, many users claimed that Allen had been dishonest in submitting the work.

San Francisco: A game designer has won the Colorado State Fair’s fine art competition using an AI-generated piece of art in the US, which has created a stir among other artists who have accused him of accelerating the death of creative jobs.

According to The Verge, the artwork titled “Theatre d’Opera Spatial”, which Jason Allen submitted for the Colorado State Fair fine arts competition under the category “Digital Arts/Digitally-Manipulated Photography”, was made using the well-known text-to-image AI generator Midjourney.

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Since most people are unfamiliar with how text-to-image AI generators function, many users claimed that Allen had been dishonest in submitting the work.

This claim was made in response to a widely shared tweet about Allen’s victory.

However, Allen has defended himself and 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,” the report quoted him as saying to The Pueblo Chieftain.

Text-to-image AI systems are trained on billions of pairs of images and text descriptions, which they mine for visual patterns, the report said.

Users then feed them text descriptions known as prompts, and the software generates an image that matches this description based on its training data, it added.