Midjourney-Generated Artwork Wins First Place at State Fair, Enraging Artists

I can't recall (in my own time) a similar response to a new tool for creation.

Maybe I'm just too young, but when digital canvas became a thing, I don't recall a similar reaction, nor when 3D rendering went (almost) photo-realistic..

Someone did some actions that resulted in an image, that image won the competition.

Sure, this will have negative consequences, but that won't be about fairness to human artists. I speculate that it will be more about how the decline in price for "original" content will fall drastically, and so will be more heavily used everywhere.. In some places, it will be welcome, for instance, header images for articles (instead of another generic stock photo, the author can chose to spend an extra 10 minutes coming up with a nice query). In other places, it might replace repetitive textures in games, or back grounding work in games, movies and ads. Pretty positive development.

But on a deeper level, I do wonder if we will lose some visual originality (there might be a shift towards more imaginative queries) but the model knows what the model knows, and the more we exercise it, the more we will see sameness.. Then again, this probably leads to more innovation in making more diverse and creative models, and who knows, maybe a new category of artist may emerge, the style-creator whose primary concern is with form and aesthetic while entirely ignoring the content.

Interesting times.

> Should this artist’s work be evaluated differently than another artist that created the same piece ‘normally’?

In the big, practical matter of determining the "better" piece, no, absolutely not. We're not judging welds made by robots and humans by who made them, we're not judging music by who composed it, we judge things by how good they are at being what they are.

Sure, as a competitive thing, we can have a "hoomans only" category, just like we have boxing categories for each gender (because, unless you're a certain kind of psychopath, you don't enjoy seeing females getting brutalized by men[1]) . We make categories so that everyone can participate within their own limits.

[1] https://www.attacktheback.com/transgender-mma-fighter-fallon...