AI generated painting wins at art competition, Twitter calls it ‘death of artistry’

An AI-generated artwork titled “Theatre d’Opera Spatial” has won first prize in the “Digital Arts/Digitally-Manipulated Photography” category of the Colorado State Fair fine arts competition. 

The artist, Jason Allen, who generated the artwork, is the president of ‘Incarnate Games’. He shared the news via social media platform Discord. 

The art was created in Midjourney. Allen provided text prompts with a mixture of classical opera and space themes. Below is the artwork he came up with.

AI-generated artwork by Jason Allen via Discord 

Following several weeks of extensive fine-tuning and curating gens, Allen was finally able to create hundreds of artworks using the software. The top three among these works were chosen and printed on the canvas after upscaling with Gigapixel A.I.

Although Allen gained the approval of the jurors at the Colorado competition, he seemed to have lost out on gaining the approval of the Twitterati. Several users took to the platform to express their dissatisfaction with the result of the competition. Yet, Jason Allen remained unapologetic about his creative piece. 

Speaking to The Pueblo Chieftain, he 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.”

Allen further added that he doesn’t consider himself an artist in the context of the work, and Instead, intends to be more of an author. 
Midjourney is a popular text-to-image AI generator that can be accessed through the Discord server, where users exhibit their artwork and share tips on improving generated outputs.