The Colorado State Fine Art Fair has an art competition every year.
This year, they added a new category – Digitally Manipulated Photography.
Digital art is art that is generated using the help of computers in some way.
Jason Allen is the 39 year old founder of Incarnate Games, a company that makes fantasy games.
He worked on a tool that creates digital art based on the input by the user.
You might remember our post on a similar tool earlier – the DALL.E 2
Midjourney is another AI tool that does the same thing. It analyses billions of pieces of art. Then, it takes text input from the user to generate art.
Jason used this tool to generate the images in his head. He then worked on these images on his own as well. After each image was generated, he had to change his instructions just so, to get the exact output that he wanted.
Finally, after a few weeks of work, he printed three of his pieces and entered them in the contest.
In his own words:
“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,”
Jason took to Discord to announce his joy at being announced the winner. (Sincarnate is his user name)
This is the winning entry:
And the problem is?
The problem is two fold.
One, digital art, the way it is done traditionally, is drawn by the artists using a stylus and a digital tablet, or manipulated using software solutions like Adobe Photoshop. In this case, the artist did not put pen to paper (or, stylus to tablet, or, mouse to screen). He gave specific instructions to the AI Program and the AI program learnt from thousands of images to create an image.
The second issue is that each artist has a style. But in this case, the artist has done no hard work in developing a style. They are able to generate some very sophisticated art without knowing enough about.. well, art.
In case of Allen, one of his first instructions to the program was – a woman in a Victorian frilly dress, wearing a space helmet. He did not need to know the Victorian style or how to create a Victorian dress in art. He just had to imagine it.
That’s not all. He could ask for art in the specific styles of some artists. Allen asked for art in the styles of Leonardo da Vinci and the American artist, Alex Grey.
Here are some of the pictures on the showcase of Midjourney.
As you can see, the work has everything from fantasy to realistic oil painting to even photographs.
So, who is doing this art – the user id, or the AI?
The various perspectives
Allen feels that AI will be a part of the art scene in the near future, and the art world should find a way to incorporate it, instead of alienating the art form.
One of the judges, Dagny McKinley, said that he did not know that the art was AI generated but that input would not have changed his decision to award this piece.
Another person associated with the contest said that perhaps its was time to introduce a new category of AI generated art in art competitions worldwide.
The internet is divided at the moment.
Question for you
What do you think is the future of AI generated art?
Share your answers in the comments below.