The AI-generated artwork entered by Jason Allen into the Colorado State Fair | Image: Jason Allen via Discord
A game designer has sparked controversy after submitting an image created by an AI text-to-image generator to a state art competition and taking home first prize.
Jason Allen entered the artwork titled “Theatre d’Opera Spatial” in the “Digital Arts / Digitally-Manipulated Photography” category of the Colorado State Fair fine arts competition but created the piece using a popular text-to-image AI generator named Midjourney.
A Twitter post describing Allen’s win went viral earlier this week (and was first covered by Vice). The post elicited a strong response, with many users claiming that Allen had been deceptive in submitting the piece, particularly as most of the public is unaware of how text-to-image AI generators work. Allen, though,…