AI-generated piece controversially wins art competition

This year at the Colorado State Fair, a piece of AI-generated art won an award for Emerging Digital Artists. In the days since, online debate about what constitutes ‘real art’ has ignited.

If you keep up with Thred, you’ll already be completely in the loop regarding AI-generated ‘text-to-image’ programs and their recent emergence.

Canny visual software like DALL-E, NightCafe, and — in this instance — Midjourney, are able to take our words as prompts and transform them into detailed (and often quite original) compositions.

Only recently, we covered a story where amateur city planners created digital mockups of famous city hotspots on DALL-E, and reimagined what they would look like if fully pedestrianised.

Despite being previously locked down by giant corporations like OpenAI and Google, these programs have since become easily accessible and are constantly used to create meme material for social media.

While, for the most part, text-to-art generators have been used as tools of recreation, recent events show the potential for AI works to leave a lasting impact on the professional scene too. Though, not everyone is championing…