Saw a post claiming AI art won a contest with a $500 prize, and the judges had no clue

I was scrolling through a tech news site yesterday and saw a story about a digital art contest in Denver. The winning piece, which got a cash prize, was made entirely by an AI tool called Midjourney. The article said the judges only found out after they picked it, and the rules didn't say anything against AI at the time. That really got me thinking about what 'fair' even means in these contests now. How are human artists supposed to compete with that, especially if the rules are silent on it?

3 comments

3 Comments

jessej2310d ago

How is that even fair? I mean, that's gotta feel awful for the artists who spent time on their work.

king.eric10d ago

Honestly, the bigger question is who owns that winning image. The person who typed the words into Midjourney didn't really "make" it, the AI did, and it was trained on millions of artworks it scraped from the web. So that prize money might be built on unpaid work from all those other artists. The whole thing is a legal mess waiting to happen, and contest rules are just the start of it.

ivan7749d ago

What about the judges? They picked it, so they're basically saying the AI's output has more value than human effort. That's a whole other problem.