By Hussameddine Al Attar | Staff Writer
A particular submission to the Colorado State Fair Art Competition has sparked a debate that reevaluates the meaning of art, the value of the artist, and whether the human monopoly of art has finally fallen. The winning submission, made by Jason M. Allen, game designer from Pueblo West, Colorado, launched him into a controversy that has artists and art-enthusiasts in fear of what the future may look like.
The backlash does not originate from the characters or setting of the piece, nor does it come from a critique of the employed style. In fact, the image itself has little to do with any of the controversy. The public is more interested in the artist than the art–the artist not implying Jason Allen but rather Midjourney, an artificial intelligence program that can output high-quality images based on user-specified prompts. Théâtre D’opéra Spatial is thus the first AI-generated artwork that has won an art contest and beat human competitors. Responding to the outrage, Allen expressed a sentiment considered both dangerous and tragic by many: “This isn’t going to stop. Art is dead, dude. It’s over. A.I. won. Humans lost.” He explained that he had disclosed the nature of his piece in his submission, and the judges had not expressed any objection to the entry.
Midjourney, along with other similar AI programs such as DALL-E 2, browse the web for any and all uploaded images and try to find an underlying pattern in them. The information deduced allows the program to generate better quality and more accurate images that fit the user prompt. This means that artists who post their work online may be unknowingly expanding the dataset available to train AI models, giving their rivals an edge that may very well put them in the lead.
While such news is revolutionary in the world of machine learning and artificial intelligence, with programmers possibly rejoicing at this breakthrough, questions on the ethics of this practice are raised. What does this mean for aspiring artists and the years of hard work they’ve dedicated to perfect their skills? Can one expect a time when humans can simply no longer compete with artificial intelligence when it comes to art?
Artificial intelligence has not only shaken the human monopoly of painting but also poetry and prose. Writing tools, such as subscription-based programs Ryter and Jasper, have been released to aid all those suffering from writer’s block. A simple two-sentence sample can help the program predict paragraph upon paragraph of writing with minimal error and with astounding semantic fidelity.
We may be driving towards a future where brush and quill are obsolete, and where human expression may be usurped by algorithms and lines of code. Whether there is any hope to protect the integrity of art remains unclear. Whether art must remain exclusive to humans is still undetermined. In a time of such uncertainty, one must ponder the possibility of the death of the artist and, if human and machine art become indistinguishable, whether anyone would attend the funeral.