AI takes first place in art competition – real artists are pissed off

Artificial intelligence creates beautiful paintings and now even wins first prize in a US competition.

Artificial intelligence is capable of amazing feats and in many cases far outperforms humans. A good example of this is the IBM program Deep Blue, which defeated the then world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997 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.

Artificial intelligence is capable of amazing feats and in many cases far outperforms humans. A good example of this is the IBM program Deep Blue, which defeated the then world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997 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 compete with 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 dismay of true artists.

First place in the Digital Art category

The digital painting has the euphonious name Théâtre D’opéra Spatial and was penned by the American Jason Allen or the program 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 this, he had hundreds of images created by the AI, then fine-tuned them over weeks of work, finally selected the best three, scaled them with gigapixel AI and printed them on canvas – you you can check them out in the following Twitter post:

The jury at the Colorado State Fair apparently also liked the paintings and even awarded first place to Théâtre D’opéra Spatial in the Digital Arts / Digitally-Manipulated Photography category. Real, human artists like Genel Jumalon, known for his fantasy works (see the tweet above), are outraged:

Someone entered an art competition with an AI-generated work and won first prize.

Yes, that sucks.

Twitter/@GenelJumalon

Twitter user OmniMorpho responded as follows – and quite bluntly: We see the death of art unfold before our eyes.

Twitter/@OmniMorpho

Is an AI painting even legal in a competition? Since Allen openly communicates how the award-winning work was created, the jury also seems to regard the painting as compliant. At least nothing is known of a subsequent withdrawal.

How do you like that? Do you also see the end of art coming, or do you perhaps even believe that artists can grow from it? Write it to us in the comments!