Humans are quite rapidly being replaced by computers. Our roads will soon be filled with driverless cars and every job seems to be being taken over by robots.
But one area you might expect humans to prevail is the arts. How can a machine generate the emotion required to create a beautiful sunset or a raging seascape?
Well, the answer, sadly, is quite easily. And not only can they muster the creativity, they can do it better than we can too.
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The Colorado State Fair fine art competition took place this week, and an AI generated artwork actually won.
Now, granted, the piece was entered by a human, so the level of s**thousery required to produce the piece was most certainly human.
However, the actual work of art was created by a machine, and, understandably, it left a sour taste in mouths of the other competitors.
Sharing a snap of several canvases posted to Discord, a user going by the name Sincarnate wrote: "I won first place."
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The man behind the machine is called Jason Allen, and he is the president of the gaming company Incarnate Games.
He won the competition with a piece called 'Théâtre D'opéra Spatial', which consists of a trippy but pretty spectacular space opera scene.
While prompted by Allen, it was created by a piece of software called Midjourney, and other artists were not impressed.
In a tweet, one critic said: "TL;DR — Someone entered an art competition with an AI-generated piece and won the first prize. Yeah that's pretty f**king s****y.”
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Another commented: "We’re watching the death of artistry unfold before our eyes.
"If creative jobs aren’t safe from machines, then even high-skilled jobs are in danger of becoming obsolete. What will we have then?”
Responding to the hate, Allen said he wasn't surprised.
Writing on Discord, he said: "I knew this would be controversial. How interesting is it to see how all these people on Twitter who are against AI generated art are the first ones to throw the human under the bus by discrediting the human element!
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"Does this seem hypocritical to you guys?"
Expanding on the process behind the painting, he said: "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 unshackling with Gigapixel AI."
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Allen said he actually labelled his piece correctly when he submitted it, sending it in as 'Jason Allen via Midjourney'.
And though it may seem shocking, it is just another means of creativity.
He said: "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.
"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."
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