Who is the Real Artist?

Recently, Jason Allen’s work, titled “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial '' won the blue ribbon in the Colorado State Fair’s annual art competition for digital art. His work was created using Midjourney, an artificial intelligence program that turns lines of text into hyper-realistic graphics and was one of the first A.I.-generated pieces to win such a prize. The painting depicts a bizarre but intriguing scene from the distant future in which human figures are in awe as they stare into a huge circular viewport into a sun-drenched landscape reminiscent of Frank Herbert’s Dune. While other digital artists were not pleased with Jason Allen’s win, Jason Allen defended his work, “I’m not going to apologize for it. I won, and I didn’t break any rules.” What’s even more important than the justice of using an aiding tool to a painting submitted to a competition is the question of whether human artists, who consider their ideas to be irreplaceably valuable, still earn a place in a creativity-dominated art world. If artificial intelligence not only mimics famous painters’ techniques and adopts painting techniques but also forms their unique style through practices, how would the art world shift with both existing and new “painters” ?

References: 

Roose, Kevin. “An A.i.-Generated Picture Won an Art Prize. Artists Aren’t Happy.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 2 Sept. 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/technology/ai-artificial-intelligence-artists.html.

Holloway, Eric, and Jay Richards. “AI Wins a Prize at an Art Show. So Are Human Artists Finished?” Mind Matters, 6 Sept. 2022, https://mindmatters.ai/2022/09/ai-wins-a-prize-at-an-art-show-so-are-human-artists-finished/.