The first round in the AI—Human battle
From its rise, we have had fun using AI-powered Art Generators — like DALL-E, and Midjourney.
Whoever/whatever/wherever you are, just drop a prompt, and magically it appears as an image, that’s it. however, Jason Allen, an artist from Colorado make it hotter, he won the state fair fine art competition with a piece titled “Théåtre D’opéra Spatial” in the Digital Arts/Digitally-Manipulated section.
This AI-generated piece features a figure with a white dress in front of two red-dressed ladies, looking from a massive window to the space outside this d’opéra theatre.
AI systems, especially text-to-image platforms are Trained on billions of internet images. They allow you to reproduce your wildest desires into reality. Due to the fact that information about each word provided to the neural network is collected from the Internet, the pictures are very realistic, almost insane. So, it is a chewing process to what is on the internet and showing the prompt writer the representation of each word plus the representation of the combination of each couple of words. In the end, the AI system is not aware at any point of what it’s doing, it is automated plagiarism, parroted en masse. AI-Generated art is demolishing people’s creative work, blurring the boundaries of reality, or smothering human art to the extent of asking about the meaning of art in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Allen was asked what art materials he had used, he told state fair officials that he used Midjourney, and no one seems to have asked about details. Dagny McKinley, One of the judges said: “It had an immediate story: People looking out into another world, everyone with their backs to you, no one facing or engaging with the viewers,” she said. “You get interested: What are they seeing?” She didn’t know this was AI-generated art but said it wouldn’t change her judgment. Mckinley added that Allen “had a concept and a vision he brought to reality, and it’s really a beautiful piece.”
Allen claims to have created “100s of images” and spent “many weeks of fine-tuning” the AI to arrive at his finished product. He was so excited and happy and wrote on Discord “I’ve set out to make a statement competitively using Midjourney and wow!”, which was posted as a screenshot on Twitter by Genel Jumalon. “I could not be more excited about having won with my favorite piece: ‘Theatre d’Opera Spatial’” Allen added. Meanwhile, the internet especially the artists, was agitated about what happened right now! stating that this is not art at any point, asking who is this Allen, where he learned art, which material he used, which school of art he is interconnected with, what is Art? and what is his art repertoire, etc. The contestant said that even if it is Digital art; where are the layers or the open files?
Despite the furor that happened, Allen didn’t break any rule of The Colorado State Fair Fine Arts competition guidelines. Maurizio Cattelan put bananas on the wall and called it art, Marcel Duchamp put porcelain urinal Porcelain Urinal and called it art, Kevin Nguyen and TJ Khayatan 16-ish years old mates were messing around at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco leave Random Objects lying around. Some people saw this Art, others did not.
In the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Maybe, Marcel Duchamp’s spirit is still wandering around us. For many artists, creating a concept, telling a story, and working hard create value. It lets the artwork be on a stage that is difficult to be copied or recreated from anyone, this artwork is an identical representation of what is inside the artist’s mind. Any Art is connected to the artist and his mind, the medium, the society, and time/period. On the contrary, from an AI perspective; ideas inside the prompt’s writer seem impossible to be visualized, it is a combination of existing artworks, and it is not related to time or society until you ask for them.
AI-based art visualizes text, it is a representation of a prompt, while Human-based Art sends a message it is a way of communication.
Nevertheless, human intelligence can create meaning in anything and can tell a story behind a white canvas on a wall in a museum. People can agree that a generated crypto punk NFT is worth millions of dollars and that a painting from an artist that took years of hard work is worthless.
where do we draw the line between Art (human-generated) and Art (AI-generated)? is it a parallel line or a connected line?
