Man wins competition using AI-generated image, ignites debate on art, artists

What is art? What is not art? Who decides what is art and who is to say something is not art? Art is held to be the expression of one's soul and by that definition alone, art appears boundless. But (as it was to take place sometime), a debate has started because a person has used AI to win a digital image competition. Artists are not at all happy.

Jason M Allen made a beautiful looking picture using Artificial Intelligence. His picture was one of 18 entries in the running for top prize in emerging artists category.

In the competition, the definition of digital art was artwork made using "digital technology as part of the creative or presentation process."

Allen made the picture using an AI named Midjourney. This AI renders images when it is fed with group of words. Obtaining images using this AI is a skillful task as any change in wording, phrasing etc., may change objects, lightings and other things in the resulting imagery.

First place to Allen's work has ruffled many feathers.

"This sucks for the exact same reason we don't let robots participate in the Olympics," one Twitter user wrote.

"This is the literal definition of 'pressed a few buttons to make a digital art piece'," another Tweeted. "AI artwork is the 'banana taped to the wall' of the digital world now."

Allen says it look 80 active hours for him to make the final image and it was a huge task and input of words resulted in 900 images which he had to process, clean, merge and more before he could make the final image that won the prize.

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