Artificial intelligence creates beautiful painting and now even scoops first prize for it in a US competition.
Artificial intelligence is capable of amazing feats and is clearly superior to humans in many cases. A good example of this is IBM’s Deep Blue programme, which in 1997 defeated the then world chess champion Garri Kasparov under tournament conditions. Or Google’s or DeepMind’s AlphaGo, which clearly defeated the South Korean Lee Sedol in the complex strategy board game Go in 2016. Sedol is considered one of the world’s best professional players.
For a long time, it was considered unthinkable that AI could also rival humans in creative areas. After all, together with emotions, this is our great unique selling point compared to algorithms. In the United States of America, however, an artificial intelligence has now succeeded in winning an art competition that was actually intended for humans. Much to the displeasure of real artists.
First place in the digital art category
This digital painting has the euphonious name Théâtre D’opéra Spatial and was penned by the US-American Jason Allen and the programme Midjourney, which is also responsible for the following, sometimes disturbing images!
In the Midjourney discord, Allen explains how the impressive work was created: According to the discord, he had hundreds of images created by the AI, then fine-tuned them over weeks of work, finally selected the best three, scaled them using Gigapixel AI and printed them on canvas – you can view them in the following Twitter post:
TL;DR – Someone entered an art competition with an AI-generated piece and won the first prize.
Yeah that’s pretty fucking shitty. pic.twitter.com/vjn1IdJcsL
– Genel Jumalon ✈️ Nan Desu Kan (@GenelJumalon) August 30, 2022
The Colorado State Fair jury apparently liked the paintings as well and even awarded first place in the Digital Arts / Digitally-Manipulated Photography category for Théâtre D’opéra Spatial. Real, human artists like Genel Jumalon (see the tweet above), known for his fantasy works, are incensed by this:
“Someone entered an art contest with an AI-generated work and won first prize.
Yeah, that’s pretty fucked up “
Is an AI painting in a competition even legal? Since Allen communicates quite openly how the prize-winning work was created, the jury also seems to consider the painting compliant with the rules. At least nothing is known about a subsequent disqualification.
What remarkable paintings the Midjourney AI can still create is also shown in the following post:
- What famous games have been crossed by AI with famous painters in these pictures?
What do you think? Do you also see the end of art, or do you think that artists can grow from this? Feel free to write us in the comments
