AI-Generated Artwork Wins First Place At a State Fair Fine Arts Competition (vice.com) 77
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A man came in first at the Colorado State Fair's fine art competition using an AI generated artwork on Monday. "I won first place," a user going by Sincarnate said in a Discord post above photos of the AI-generated canvases hanging at the fair. Sincarnate's name is Jason Allen, who is president of Colorado-based tabletop gaming company Incarnate Games. According to the state fair's website (PDF), he won in the digital art category with a work called "Theatre D'opera Spatial." The image, which Allen printed on canvas for submission, is gorgeous. It depicts a strange scene that looks like it could be from a space opera, and it looks like a masterfully done painting. Classical figures in a Baroque hall stair through a circular viewport into a sun-drenched and radiant landscape.
But Allen did not paint "Theatre D'opera Spatial," AI software called Midjourney did. It used his prompts, but Allen did not wield a digital brush. This distinction has caused controversy on Twitter where working artists and enthusiasts accused Allen of hastening the death of creative jobs. "TL;DR -- Someone entered an art competition with an AI-generated piece and won the first prize," artist Genel Jumalon said in a viral tweet about Allen's win. "Yeah that's pretty fucking shitty." "We're watching the death of artistry unfold before our eyes," a Twitter user going by OmniMorpho said in a reply that gained over 2,000 likes. "If creative jobs aren't safe from machines, then even high-skilled jobs are in danger of becoming obsolete. What will we have then?" "I knew this would be controversial," Allen said in the Midjourney Discord server on Tuesday. "How interesting is it to see how all these people on Twitter who are against AI generated art are the first ones to throw the human under the bus by discrediting the human element! Does this seem hypocritical to you guys?"
He added: "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," he wrote in a post before the winners were announced.
"What if we looked at it from the other extreme, what if an artist made a wildly difficult and complicated series of restraints in order to create a piece, say, they made their art while hanging upside-down and being whipped while painting," he said. "Should this artist's work be evaluated differently than another artist that created the same piece 'normally'? I know what will become of this in the end, they are simply going to create an 'artificial intelligence art' category I imagine for things like this."
But Allen did not paint "Theatre D'opera Spatial," AI software called Midjourney did. It used his prompts, but Allen did not wield a digital brush. This distinction has caused controversy on Twitter where working artists and enthusiasts accused Allen of hastening the death of creative jobs. "TL;DR -- Someone entered an art competition with an AI-generated piece and won the first prize," artist Genel Jumalon said in a viral tweet about Allen's win. "Yeah that's pretty fucking shitty." "We're watching the death of artistry unfold before our eyes," a Twitter user going by OmniMorpho said in a reply that gained over 2,000 likes. "If creative jobs aren't safe from machines, then even high-skilled jobs are in danger of becoming obsolete. What will we have then?" "I knew this would be controversial," Allen said in the Midjourney Discord server on Tuesday. "How interesting is it to see how all these people on Twitter who are against AI generated art are the first ones to throw the human under the bus by discrediting the human element! Does this seem hypocritical to you guys?"
He added: "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," he wrote in a post before the winners were announced.
"What if we looked at it from the other extreme, what if an artist made a wildly difficult and complicated series of restraints in order to create a piece, say, they made their art while hanging upside-down and being whipped while painting," he said. "Should this artist's work be evaluated differently than another artist that created the same piece 'normally'? I know what will become of this in the end, they are simply going to create an 'artificial intelligence art' category I imagine for things like this."
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I'm no art critic, but I know what I like, and this isn't even close.
I also know what I like, and I think it looks pretty good. The judges thought it was the best when compared side-by-side with human-generated art, without knowing an AI created it.
Perhaps you are being overly negative only because you already know how it was made.
You are as judgemental as the bartender in Mos Eisely who wouldn't let the droids in his bar.
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I've been engaging with AI "art" content for a while and there's basically a handful of problems that need to be solved:
- Who owns the training data. Many "image" data corpus are images that are not copyright-free. The AI can learn from these under research fair use rules in the US, but not other countries like Japan where there is no fair use and the moral rights of the artists will prevent "AI" from learning from artists in the country, or even developing models that can be used in the country.
- Who owns
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Here's looking forward to an human future where a human can make fresh jokes that keep me laughing all day, make paintings that make me cry, draft melodies I'll whistle for the rest of my life, and write stories that make me a better human.
Funny how that criteria doesn't magically apply to humans also. Kind of weird that AI has to be superhuman for it to be considered worth your time.
Wake me when there's one human who can do all those things very very well.
AI's Comments on AI Generated Art (Score:1)
It is sometimes used by museums, galleries, authors, or artists to generate a wider audience. You can apply it to make custom art, as per the example of artist Kolli Putri’s project Poetry Robot (see more). So you can expect AI generated art to be widespread in the near future. So I ask again, when can we expect these performances, symposia and exhibitions to be ruled out of existence forever?
- The above comment was AI generated. (app.inferkit.com/demo)
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not good (Score:1)
Expect ML assistance to do art, what heavyweight frameworks-upon-frameworks has done to the world of software development: enabled huge amount of boilerplate, but greatly increased fragility, removed human accessability & hampered creativity.
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"No, four meaningless strings of english words, contradicting themselves and referencing a fake example of synthetic nothing-stuff is barely of note."
So... no different from critics, then?
Not that skilled after all (Score:5, Funny)
"Yeah that's pretty fucking shitty." "We're watching the death of artistry unfold before our eyes," a Twitter user going by OmniMorpho said in a reply that gained over 2,000 likes. "If creative jobs aren't safe from machines, then even high-skilled jobs are in danger of becoming obsolete. What will we have then?"
I guess you aren't that "high-skilled" after all. Welcome to the world of the rest of us talentless folks.
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The "laws of CRUD" have been fairly stable since the RDBMS was invented. It would be fairly easy for AI to pick out patterns and at least assist with a lot of it. The hard part is keeping up with the Fad of the Month and reworking & relearning everything. Developing the same CRUD app takes roughly 3x the people hours than in the 90's. We somehow de-evolved, probably due to chasing eye candy and fads instead of value parsimony. We became feature and/or potential-feature pack-rats, nuking YAGNI in the bal
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Will not hasten the death of creative professions (Score:2)
AI is not currently hastening the death of creative jobs in general, only the low ones that were just doing basic queries (here Dave, please make "a drawing of a cat on a chair" to illustrate page 3 of our newsletter) that indeed AI can do faster.
Photography replaced basic portrait painting, and 3D animation software replaced drawing frame by frame. But creative drawing and cartoon animation exist more than ever.
AI artwork are just a new tool to help creative people produce awesome drawings faster.
Interesting (Score:2)
Classical figures in a Baroque hall stair through a circular viewport into a sun-drenched and radiant landscape.
I'm presuming the writer was doing this article pro bono. Either that or the editor didn't do their job.
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In this case AI = Automatic Paintbrush (Score:4, Interesting)
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I was rather amazed that those actually returned relevant responses. But you're right, I never would have searched for those without prompting.
Darn! there goes Plan B (Score:2)
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If AI ever took my job, plan B is to become a backhoe operator [dreamstime.com].
He's not wrong. (Score:3)
From the article:
"To developers and technically minded people, it’s this cool thing, but to illustrators it’s very upsetting because it feels like you’ve eliminated the need to hire the illustrator." -- cartoonist Matt Borrs
Suddenly, it's become possible to make full and detailed illustrations with minimal skill. As these tools progress, they'll be able to transform the most crude of drawings seemingly into masterpieces with a few identifying labels.
I've given some thought as to where this kind of generated imagery is going and I've concluded that these generated works will replace a lot of artists. Right now 3d models ("assets") are all manually made and/or procedurally generated. It only makes sense that an image processing pipeline (because there are many of steps) will be made to generate complete 3D scenes with assets that can be manipulated. It may need tweaks every step of the way but the benefits are the radically reduced time and cost of asset development. Both game and movie development are going to be impacted and most likely there will be close to a one-to-one overlap in the technology. I say this because when this happens then the movie industry is going to shift into being entirely motion capture and CGI because it will be MUCH cheaper to make movies this way and you won't have to pay the latest dreamboat and make sure the scene looks perfect, just get someone that can act, use mo-cap and make everything/everyone look/sound the way you want thanks to computers.
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I'm pretty sure that neural networks will be produced for each asset to minimize computational time while making them move just right.
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Indeed. That would be a perfect application for a GAN.
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It's not just physics, it's understanding how the world moves and how those phsyics apply to it visually. And I suspect it's far easier/cheaper to amass and analise large datasets of static images than large datasets videos.
As far as these particular models are concerned, the world is static.
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On top of this, transformer applies the attention mechanism which is O(N^2) so for video you get to O(N^6) complexity. That means only very short clips with low rez can be used.
We're now catching up to video. The impact of video in training will be learning procedural knowledge - how to do things, how to accomplish a task step by step. That means better AI on the desktop an
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That's an overly simplistic model. Notice how things shift as you walk around. Generally I find that I separate things into three flat planes at different mean distances. (They can be at angles to each other.) And most things are seen as flat images on one of those planes. When I look at any particular object, that particular object is popped into a more detailed image, but I'm still only modeling (at visual levels of detail) the surface facing me, though now different parts of it can be at different di
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I have a friend who works as an animator for video games. They use motion capture but then tweak it manually. Apparently the issues are usually down to the model not having the correct joints to mimic the real-life version (e.g. the human body), and the motion capture rig producing less than perfect results.
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But a lot of things that look good in stills fall apart when they move. (Including a lot of movie CGI).
Example: "SheHulk" has some of the worst CGI I have
ever seen, despite the fact that Disney owns Pixar and ILM,
two of the top CGI shops in the world.
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Suddenly, it's become possible to make full and detailed illustrations with minimal skill.
So... kind like photography then?
Will nobody think of the poor portrait painters?
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No, it's more sophisticated than that but this also put photography on the ropes.
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I disagree but here's the thing, everything have put out was manually made and modified by humans. By utilizing a pipeline of various AIs, it will be far more realistic in a fraction of the time with a fraction of the people needed to work on it. AI isn't magic but it can boost productivity exponentially.
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How I read what you said: "Deep Fakes will become even more realistic"
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No, this is next level stuff. Face mapping is a parlor trick in comparison.
Where was this piece of shit guy... (Score:2)
Incidentally, I almost never have a problem with human cashiers. I regularly have issues with automated check outs, so I don't shop places that have them. Getting harder to avoid them though.
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I prefer electronic cashiers (Score:2)
Never had a serious problem, and my local Aldi store has a member of staff on duty to resolve any issues. But the store still has traditional checkout staff as well.
Given the competition in, at least the UK's, grocery trade, all the savings will go back to the consumer as prices are competed down.
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Bread Prices and Aldi (Score:2)
Aldi arrived in Manchester in 1990, at a time when a loaf of ordinary white bread was universally on sale for 54p. Aldi started selling the same for 17p. This immediately forced other bread sellers to match this lower price.
This is merely a single example of the effect of Aldi; indeed Tescos, the biggest UK food retailer, having lost market share massively, has resorted to advertising some its prices as 'price matched' against Aldi. This is a perverse effect as it reminds us that Tescos is more expensive fo
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Why is it? (Score:3)
This distinction has caused controversy on Twitter where working artists and enthusiasts accused Allen of hastening the death of creative jobs.
Why is it that art people seem to think that non-art jobs don't require significant creativity skills, and also be "creative jobs" ?
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Reality Disconnect (Score:1)
“Technology is increasingly deployed to make gig jobs and to make billionaires richer, and so much of it doesn't seem to benefit the public good enough,”
Uh, hey, dumbass, the reason why those billionaires are getting richer is because of the improvements to the public good that they help generate. See, how capitalism works is that when a company does shit people like...such as say, make Google Maps, which they let your dumb ass use for free, they are rewarded by making money. That encourages them to make more shit that the public wants. Companies that don't contribute to the public good by making shit people want just fade away....unless they're subsidized
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the reason why those billionaires are getting richer is because of the improvements to the public good that they help generate.
That's how free markets work, not crony capitalism.
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Even for free markets, that's an idealization that only captures one stage of their development. At least for anything that's complex to build or requires ingredients not locally available.
There is no historic record of a "free market" existing. They always exist in a context. A minimal rule would be something like "you can't use violence to produce customers", but in the examples I've looked at, there have always been additional rules (although the one I proposed isn't always present).
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There is no historic record of a "free market" existing.
Yes. That's why there's no historic record of capitalism not being shitty.
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Uh, hey, dumbass, the reason why those billionaires are getting richer is because of the improvements to the public good that they help generate.
Nah it can't be because of endless lobbying to corrupt the laws in their favor.
Coporations war on public domain:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The reason copyright and patent had limited times was to spur innovation, now the fact that copyright has been endlessly lobbied for what is effectively infinite time, no one should respect copyright law at this point. The whole intention was to preserve human culture, right now in the game industry, valve and everyone is bent on destroying it by monopolizing it f
my use case (Score:2)
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my AI wrote this ! (Score:2)
People are getting hip to AI fakes. I suppose it's time to confess. Over all these years, the comments attributed to me were actually written by an AI called Smegma that I created on a Commodore Amiga. In recent years its comments have been getting higher scores than most.
Sorry, I'm just musing over the question of whether it is worthwhile for anyone to pretend an AI did creative work that was actually done by a human. This might work if you were trying to get venture capitalists to invest in your AI startu
I have to say (Score:1)
...it is a cool picture. And do note the author admitted they curated it, as the bot generated multiple candidates, and tuned parameters. Good curating is a skill in itself. After all, we'd never know about the Beatles if a record co. didn't recognize the talent. They were turned down multiple times before.
Look at Chess (Score:2)
An analogy of this scenario is the rise of chess computer software such as Stockfish. Now a smartphone running Stockfish will easily defeat a grandmaster. But it hasn't killed chess. Human vs. Human competition happens. Importantly, using an engine like Stockfish, while purporting to be a non-computer-aided-human is considered cheating.
It should be the same with art. There is a place for computer AI generated art, but it must be made clear that it is. Examples like in the TFA are like the time that computer
Nah - just enjoy the final output (Score:2)
I really don't care whether a picture is drawn using pencils the artist made and paints that they personally created by grinding colourful rocks, or whether it's AI 'created'. Do I enjoy it? Great. Does it cause me to yawn? Let's go do something else.
Re:Nah - just enjoy the final output (Score:4, Interesting)
I really don't care whether a picture is drawn using pencils the artist made and paints that they personally created by grinding colourful rocks, or whether it's AI 'created'.
If we're talking about an art competition, and we are, then only when people create the art should they be permitted to enter it in a competition. So is giving text prompts to software creating? Not unless you create the software.
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That's right, it's only creation if you wrote the software yourself. It's cheating if you just tell some AI, "Paint me a pretty picture."
Likewise, it's cheating if you can just tell Photoshop to use the smudge tool or various filters to manipulate your image. Unless you wrote those filters yourself.
And it's cheating to use MS-Paint to hand-place each pixel specifically. Unless you're the guy who wrote MS-Paint, obviously.
And it's cheating to use paint and brush that you purchased at an art store. It
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That's not a good example, because chess is a performance art. Yes, the finished games of grandmasters are studied, but the act of chess is the playing of the game. This is not true of painters, or even photographers.
Value of art (Score:2)
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For some reason the original "Mona Lisa" is automatically considered a lot more valuable than any copy, regardless of the quality of the copy. In fact, various paintings have lost considerable value when it turned out that the artist that painted them wasn't the one that had been believed to have painted them. See Elmyr de Hory.
I'm not going to defend that as sensible, but it's something that's actual, and therefore needs to be accepted as such.
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My argument is you don't deny reality. If reality involves lots of people acting stupid, it's still reality, and should be accepted as such. This isn't an argument that YOU should act stupid.
Prompt tweaking != art (Score:2)
It's not art, any more than a collage of renaissance painting parts, cut out and stuck to cardboard, is a renaissance painting. There's no craft in it. If an obvious text request has a chance of being as good as a "secret text prompt" - it's clear what part of the system is doing the heavy lifting, and it's not the human.
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AI "art", really? (Score:2)
Call me when an AI wins a comedy improv
Recalls Duchamp's fountain debate 100 years ago (Score:2)
All of the controversy on twitter is a pure echo of the American art community's response to Marcel Duchamp's submission of a urinal to an art show staged by the Society of Independent Artists in 1917. [wikipedia.org]
Back then the critics complained the 'fountain' was not a product of the artist's hand. Duchamp responded, "R. Mutt (Duchamp's pseudonym) pointed out that the fact Fountain was not made by the hand of the art