
“I felt like: this is exactly what I set out to accomplish.” He had won the division, along with a $300 prize. Allen saw a blue ribbon hanging next to his piece. Several weeks later, while walking the fairground in Pueblo, Mr. “The fair was coming up,” he said, “and I thought: How wonderful would it be to demonstrate to people how great this art is?” Allen got the idea to submit one of his Midjourney creations to the Colorado State Fair, which had a division for “digital art/digitally manipulated photography.” He had a local shop print the image on canvas and submitted it to the judges. “I felt like it was demonically inspired - like some otherworldly force was involved.”Įventually, Mr. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” he said. No matter what he typed, Midjourney seemed capable of making it. Allen became obsessed, creating hundreds of images and marveling at how realistic they were.
Blue ribbon minimalist drawing series#
Users type a series of words in a message to Midjourney the bot spits back an image seconds later. This summer, he got invited to a Discord chat server where people were testing Midjourney, which uses a complex process known as “diffusion” to turn text into custom images.

image generators would compare with the human artists whose works he commissioned. He runs a studio, Incarnate Games, which makes tabletop games, and he was curious how the new breed of A.I. Allen, 39, began experimenting with A.I.-generated art this year. These apps have made many human artists understandably nervous about their own futures - why would anyone pay for art, they wonder, when they could generate it themselves? They have also generated fierce debates about the ethics of A.I.-generated art, and opposition from people who claim that these apps are essentially a high-tech form of plagiarism. Jason Allen created his artwork with Midjourney, an artificial intelligence program that turns lines of text into hyper-realistic graphics. But tools released this year - with names like DALL-E 2, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion - have made it possible for rank amateurs to create complex, abstract or photorealistic works simply by typing a few words into a text box. “I won, and I didn’t break any rules.”Ī.I.-generated art has been around for years. “I’m not going to apologize for it,” he said. Allen via Midjourney” - was created using A.I., and that he hadn’t deceived anyone about its origins. He said that he had made clear that his work - which was submitted under the name “Jason M. Allen’s work, “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial,” took home the blue ribbon in the fair’s contest for emerging digital artists - making it one of the first A.I.-generated pieces to win such a prize, and setting off a fierce backlash from artists who accused him of, essentially, cheating. He created it with Midjourney, an artificial intelligence program that turns lines of text into hyper-realistic graphics. Allen of Pueblo West, Colo., didn’t make his entry with a brush or a lump of clay. This year, the Colorado State Fair’s annual art competition gave out prizes in all the usual categories: painting, quilting, sculpture.īut one entrant, Jason M. Jason Allen’s A.I.-generated work, “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial,” took first place in the digital category at the Colorado State Fair.
