By Olivia Dai ’26, Arts and Entertainment Staff Writer

Théâtre D’opéra Spatial, A.I. generated image courtesy of Jason Allen

Jason Allen, a video game designer, spent over 80 hours creating art pieces for the 2022 Colorado State Fair. He was eventually awarded the first prize ribbon and a $300 cash prize. However, he did not create his art through traditional means. Instead, his first place artwork was generated by artificial intelligence (A.I.).

Over the past few years, A.I. has recorded major achievements: it is the backbone of smart assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa and can carry out commands such as finding Airpods and turning off the lights. Google’s Deep Blue beat internationally ranked players of complex games such as Go! and chess. Though these wins did not spark much controversy, Allen’s did. His work, “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial,” consists of medieval figures facing a giant, gaping hole leading to a world filled with bright lights. It is one of the first A.I.-generated artworks to receive such a highly respected award. The art community, however, denounced him as a real artist.

Allen revealed the use of A.I. after he had won the prize, but the judges say that they would have still given him the prize regardless of how he created it. “I’m not going to apologize for it [submitting A.I. generated artwork],” Allen said defending accusations of foul play when interviewed by The Pueblo Chieftain. “I won, and I didn’t break any rules.”

Allen started to create art when he was invited to a Discord group in the summer of 2022. The messaging app uses a bot called Midgard, which produces images after the user types in a few prompts. Allen became obsessed, typing in prompt after prompt. No matter what he typed, Midgard seemed to produce it. “A supernatural reality… … something we haven’t even been able to experience yet, past the great beyond,” Allen said. He has created over 900 iterations of the award-winning piece in a series he now calls “Space Opera Theater.”

Allen’s work has sparked a large controversy in the art world. Many artists argue that A.I. will lead to the death of art, as well as many other consequences such as job loss and photo manipulation. Art requires one to recall an experience and transmit the experience to others. If one creates A.I. art that evokes laughter, it is not art since the computer is not remembering a previous experience. Cartoonist Matt Bors, in an interview with the Atlantic, summarizes these concerns as, “To developers and technically minded people, [A.I. is] this cool thing, but to illustrators, it’s very upsetting because it feels like you’ve eliminated the need to hire the illustrator.” He argues that many artists will lose their jobs in the industry because of the efficiency of A.I. and their art will be devalued. According to Bors, using A.I. is essentially hiring a third-party machine to create art, similar to someone commissioning an art piece and claiming said art as theirs. 

A.I. tools may also have unintended consequences as they could be used to spread misinformation through synthetic media called deep fakes, in which a person in an image or video is swapped with the likeliness of another. For example, a heavily manipulated video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky circulated around sites like Youtube and Twitter in March, in which the president appeared to tell his soldiers to lay down arms and surrender to Russia. Although social media companies quickly removed the video, it added to the misinformation spread across Ukraine as Russia invaded the country.

Although A.I. can produce new art, it only creates images by combining aspects of existing media. When asked about A.I. generated art, Newark Academy book cover illustrator Angela Huang ‘27 stated that, “A.I. can merge designs of a character to make an unrecognizable one, but cannot create a story from it, nor describe what details of that design hint of a story.” Since A.I. works off data from others, it can never express the same emotional significance as normal art. In this way, A.I. cannot compare to human creativity. Additionally, A.I. art steals other art without the artist’s permission and uses it to create similar art in the blink of an eye,  one of the challenges artists face: art theft. Although this is the case, artists must learn to adapt working alongside A.I. artists to promote their own style.

As times are changing, people and definitions are changing too. We shouldn’t be confined by what society believes is correct. In the future, A.I. art could be considered a true art form, and it can be a fantastic tool to enhance an artist’s ability to express themselves.