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Comment by femto113 | Hacker News Reader

This guy should return the prize and apologize for deceiving the judges. The rules state:

"All items entered for the competition must be entered in the name of the person who created the entry."

If Allen had hired 100 humans to create images based on his prompt, and then submitted his favorite of those under his name I don't think anyone would consider that legitimate. IMO having Midjourney generate 100 images is no different: Allen did not "create" this art, it was created by Midjourney (and by proxy, by all of the artists it trained on).

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"Allen said that he made clear that his artwork was generated with Midjourney, an online AI art tool, when he was dropping off his artwork and in his narrative submission.

Olga Robak, the director of communications with the Colorado Department of Agriculture, confirmed that Allen mentioned Midjourney in his submission statement.

According to fair rules, anybody can file a grievance against submitted items — but they will need to post a $300 bond, cite specific rules that have been broken and present a grievance letter in person.

The bond can be returned if the grievance leads to a violation of the rules but Robak said a preliminary review showed Allen had not broken any."

— https://eu.chieftain.com/story/news/2022/08/31/ai-painting-w...

That "an online AI art tool" in the first sentence is potentially misleading, as the clarification is being made in this article, but this clarification was not made by the artist at the time.

He said (in the Midjourney Discord) that when submitting he "stated that he made them via Midjourney", but it sounds like he didn't make clear that this was an AI tool.

Sincarnate — 26/08/2022 Yes the description clearly stated I created them via Midjourney starshadowx2 — 26/08/2022 Was it explained what Midjourney was though Sincarnate — 26/08/2022 This is why I did it. Should I have explained what Midjourney was? If so, why?

He also mentions that he originally mentioned Midjourney in the caption, but didn't correct them when they edited that part out.

I think these sorts of details do matter.

Even though is intentionally deceiving, he didn't broke any rule.

I'm not sure I'd even call it intentionally deceiving, just a significant omission. I think it is part of why some people were annoyed though - it's obviously a bit more nuanced than the headline suggests, and not all a bunch of luddites totally against the use of AI in art. The specifics matter - some people found particular aspects of how this person went about it annoying.

He entered into a "digital art" category and used a tool available to digital artists. If they wanted him to only tools such as Photoshop or a Wacom tablet, the onus is on the judges to outline that as part of the rules.

It would be like having a cake making competition — if you don't want people to use ready-made royal icing or marzipan, you specify that all elements need to be made from scratch.

I assume you would enter an item in the name of the pencil you used to draw it as well then?

You would, and he did.

You name, and explain, what tools you used when submitting an art piece. The general public get to see the "via MidJourney" tagline, and the judges get to have a bit further read of the description of how it was made, during the submission. Nothing here was hidden.

And, if we ignore that this gallery was for digital art, you submitted pencil, then you would say "in pencil", and you would describe the place, and who was present, when you were making your piece.

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