The Midjourney AI-generated image won the first prize in the Colorado Art Fair competition category. How to define the boundaries of artificial creation?

The most controversial topic news in the art world today must be that the work generated by artificial intelligence won the first prize in the Colorado State Fair Art Competition in the United States. According to the report of the North American digital media Vice, a Discord account named Sincarnate used The author said that he won first place in the state fair art competition, and the work he submitted to the competition was actually completed through Midjourney's AI image generation tool.

What on earth happened?

Sincarnate, whose real name is Jason Allen, is the president of the board game company Incarnate Games in Colorado, and he won the Digital Arts/Digital Photography category for his work titled Théâtre D'opéra Spatial. Digitally-Manipulated Photography) first prize. It is conceivable that such a result caused controversy in the community, "That's so bad." Artist Genel Jumalon commented on the incident on Twitter. Coincidentally, he is not the only one "We are witnessing the demise of art," a user named OmniMorpho said under his tweet, one unhappy person said.

It is not surprising that artists are concerned about the rise of artificial intelligence art, and the report also mentions that an earlier article by Charlie Warzel of The Atlantic media used images produced by Midjourney in his article . As an illustration has already caused the same controversy, cartoonist Matt Borrs said: "It's like you don't need to hire an illustrator anymore, which is very frustrating."

AI creation controversy is no coincidence

Not long ago, a set of AI drawing tools " mimicking " developed by a Japanese company, because it can generate illustration works by learning the style of designated painters, also set off a rebound from the majority of painters, and the painters even threatened to prohibit AI from learning their own. The style of painting avoids affecting livelihoods, although it is actually unfounded in terms of laws and regulations. It seems that no matter what market, encountering such a powerful AI technology will make the creators on the front line feel that it is about life and death. threatening.

Midjourney has caused different waves in the Taiwan market. In the early stage of the promotion of this tool, like many new services in the market, it adopted a closed invitation code system. Therefore, Chris Stewart, an enthusiastic digital creator, established a mutual aid society. Midjourney AI hopes to give more people the opportunity to know this tool by giving back invitation codes to communicate. Soon after, Taiwanese film director Lin Sihan, who has been concerned about AI image technology for a long time, was shocked by Midjourney's powerful computing results, and then established The Chinese community " Midjourney AI Taiwan Community " (formerly known as Midjourney AI Taiwan Community Expansion Plan), originally aimed at communicating with relatives and friends, helped members obtain test qualifications through the mutual aid mechanism created by Chris. With the help of the fuel, this community has rapidly grown from hundreds of people to a large community of more than 10,000 people. It has 27,000 members and became the largest Midjourney community in the world. Chris's club breaks down.

What is the community saying?

Can a work generated by artificial intelligence really be considered a personal creation? The same concerns can be felt among Taiwanese creators. Some people believe that images generated by AI skip the process of refining too many traditional creators, and even do not need to have the same self-cultivation to quickly and mass-produce images. Can a work really be called a creation? Some people also said that a high degree of automation will weaken human aesthetic insight and practical ability. These arguments are actually reasonable, but the core of the discussion should be around the essence of creation, not the advantages brought by AI. Otherwise, use traditional Are painters with media necessarily better than those with computers? Or is a designer who uses phototyping and typeset on manuscript paper better than a designer who uses a computer? Similar debates may occur when there are leaps in technological breakthroughs in various professional fields, and the analogy can go on endlessly.

However, on the contrary, there are also creators who hold different opinions. In the Midjourney AI veteran society, which has a total number of 146,000 members, there are not a few creators with positive opinions. Community member Patrik Hurtig uses a piece from Index Music. Andy Worhal's photo on the cover of the magazine NME said: "For those who criticize artificial intelligence-generated image technology, remember that this is what digital art looked like in the early days, and it is today a multi-billion dollar industry. Even so, it is still There are artists who use both traditional and digital media to make a living. AI-generated imagery will certainly develop in a similar pattern over the next decade, but it will never completely replace other forms of art as it still requires manual input. "

As far as artistic value is concerned, Cai Weide, an assistant professor at the Department of Digital Media and Cultural and Educational Industry of National Taitung University , who is a member of the MJ Taiwan community, left his own views in the community post: "The art market mainly focuses on the artist himself. , whether they will continue to create, whether they have creativity, whether they are topical, and other investment properties and markets, have nothing to do with the creative form of the work.” Today’s art market atmosphere, creative tools or forms are indeed not the main value basis—except Outside of the short-lived "NFT Summer" in 2021. But in all fairness, the topicality that the artist can create may be more important, such as the Italian contemporary artist Maurizio Cattelan who sold his banana art work "Comedian" at NT$3.65 million in 2019 Art Basel Miami.

How much originality does it take to be called a creation?

A bit too far, let's go back to the essence of creation. In the cover feature report of La Vie Magazine's August issue of "The Professional and His Tools", Midjourney's themed interview "You Type, I Make a Picture, Midjourney Gives You a Story" There is also a related discussion in " The Wings of Double Creation" . The editor asked in my interview with Lin Sihan: " Will AI drawing tools replace people? Can AI-generated works be considered as personal original works? " I replied: " AI drawing may be the mainstream creation tool for the next generation. As for the originality issue, I think the controversy is that Midjourney imitates the style of other works to draw, but people cannot avoid referring to others in the creation process. Internalizing and expressing a concept is more than just imitation. The line between tribute and plagiarism is always hotly debated, and we don’t have a rule that says how original a work is in order to be called your work.”

At the end of Vise's report, Jason Allen said that he knew that this approach would be controversial. Although these critics are now criticizing whether the work itself is art in the way of creation, he believes that the art world will eventually recognize that art created by artificial intelligence is also. A creative category. In fact, he has already calculated hundreds of images on Midjourney before submitting his works to the competition. After several weeks of post-production and fine-tuning in Photoshop, he selected three images with Gigapixel expanded to a sufficient resolution and printed them for the competition. The work is clearly marked as being produced by Midjourney, from which we can actually see that he definitely has a certain insistence on the creation itself, which somewhat echoes what I said in the La Vie interview.

"I won't stop because of this," he said. "This victory will only make me more confident in my mission." Although the conclusion is arbitrary, it also represents the will and determination of the pioneers in the field to defend the value of progress.

Are you a creator? Have you ever been exposed to AI generative art? What are your interpretations and opinions on this event? Welcome to share in the message. If you think the content inspires you, please share and clap, and welcome to follow my Instagram . :-)

Reference:

• An AI-Generated Artwork Won First Place at a State Fair Fine Arts Competition, and Artists Are Pissed
• How does Midjourney work? Experts reveal keyword skills, limitations and development potential of AI drawing tools