Jason Allen aka Sincarnate on Discord, used Midjourney to /imagine a series of images that were entered into the Digital Category of the Colorado State Fair, with the disclaimer that the images were generated using Midjourney upon submission.
Hi everyone! After a one month hiatus, I have returned with an exciting announcement about my personal project I've made using Midjourney. 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 upscaling with Gigapixel A.I. I entered into the Colorado State Fair fine arts competition (digital arts category). I won first place. Here are the results. I've set out to make a statement using Midjourney in a competitive manner and wow! I could not be more excited about having won with my favorite piece: "Theatre d'Opera Spatial"
#show-and-tell – Artist Visual Style Encyclopedia | Discord
Here's an interesting back and forth between Sincarnate and another Discord user:
TopDon: In my opinion you should have made it clear it was art created through artificial intelligence, you could have briefly explained your process of how it was made and opened the conversation on AI art further
Sincarnate: Is it common for artists to explain their process just for the sake of clarification?
TopDon: No, but the process of how you created the art also isn't common and I could imagine it influencing the voting decision. As you made some money this is more of a conversation of being transparent, but I personally don't think you did anything wrong
Sincarnate: Right, and I understand why you are raising the subject, and this is one of the many reasons I decided to enter. You mentioned this is uncommon, but I wonder if you are also thinking in terms of what people might consider for a submission to be acceptable or not. For example, perhaps people would be against the idea of a.i. generated art being entered into a contest (even if it was in the digital art category.) Why would you think this would be? Is it a perceived level of effort thing? Is it coming from the absence of a physical skill / actively creating the piece from x amount of time invested? Or maybe the perceived lack of years of experience of the artist/author? All of these? If this is true, then are they judging the art or the method by which it was created? 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 (this is extreme.) 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.
TopDon: They are judging both the art and the effort it took to create, and people as a general rule value effort. So yes, that upside-down artists work would be valued even more highly due to the process it took to create. On the other side, many would see the effort, training and experience put in to create AI art as substantially less than it would take for the average artist to create the same piece. So as a result value it less.
These types of conversations are what will determine the weft and weave of the meme threads that form the very fabric of our culture. Perhaps next year's Colorado State Fair will have a segregated "AI/Non-AI Digital Category"?
