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Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

> they didn't explicitly forbid AI

Yes they did; the contestants must be at least 18 years old and residents of Ohio.

AI is neither.

Would it be within contest rules if an 19-year-old resident of Ohio served as an artistic director, giving suggestions to a 12-year-old from Kentucky who does the actual work?

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They only care who submitted it not who actually created it.

“Yes, the 7th grader who submitted this poster calls it the ‘Mona Lisa’. Doesn’t have anything to do with the state fair, but I swear this one belongs in a museum! Honorable Mention for sure!”

If it's not easily recognizable then yes they'll think the 7th grader did create it, it's just the default assumption. Maybe now they should run every submission through reverse image search then.

No they didn’t—from TFA:

  When the poster contest was originally formed in 2024, the use of AI was permitted if explained as a part of the application process.

Since current US legal decisions indicate that genAI works are not copyrightable, this is troublesome for any organization that wants exclusive licensing for publicity. The State Fair would expect to incorporate their art winners into marketing, posters, and expect to strike down derivative works and other commercial uses.

Not to mention that any Ai-entrant piece could be duplicated by any other entrant.

Probably they figured that the risk of any of that stuff causing actual problems was less than the headache of publicly disqualifying an already-announced winner who has a colorable argument that she didn't break any rules.

Not to mention that any Ai-entrant piece could be duplicated by any other entrant

With great difficulty, maybe. You'd need the exact model, prompt, seed, and hardware, and even then I believe there is some nondeterminism.

I was thinking more like C-c C-v, or just take a photo of a competitor’s poster, but you do your seeding

Whether is not copyrightable is not relevant to this. The parent poster's point is just as salient. The creator, not the sumbitter needs to meet the criteria in question. A clanker isn't a resident of Ohio.

I'm largely in the not fond of AI artwork camp and the weird rigging on the chair lifts in the winning entry bug me no end (first thing that caught my eye), however ...

Is Jeff Koons (and others in the "massive installation" artwork game) the creator of his works or does that honour go to the minions that instantiate his wishes?

We're talking "grand vision" description here .. now you 30 people go and flesh out the details.

So that is your personal interpretation of an implicit rule. Well, the Ohio State Fair has explicitly ruled differently than you.

Do we need to bust out the Wiktionary links again here?

Not really, AI is a tool and so it's assumed that the submitter is the creator. The Ohio judges will not be as pedantic as you and then other comment above try to make it seem.

No AI is a tool. It’s like you saying they didn’t say you can’t use oil paint.

Oil paint would be a bit more controversial if it painted the picture all by itself…

You're right, for example photography was controversial.

And photography is something where the image determines whether or not it’s art. If you are constructing an image using form, shape, light, subjects, tool selection, and all sorts of other factors to translate a 3D scene into a 2D image, revealing your particular perspective, then that is art, and pretty difficult at that. If you take a flat, objective, documentary picture of a painting, that’s not art. If you take a picture of something at the store you’d like to research later, that’s not art. If you’re telling someone, with your words, maybe some sketches and marked-up iterations what you want the picture to look like but they actually take it and finish it, you’re not the artist— you’re commissioning art.

Is taping a banana to the wall art?

It depends. Personally, the banana taped to the wall, doesn’t do anything for me, but I once saw a canvas with just three slightly raised simple curved ridges in an interesting pattern, all in white. It was very simple and could probably be done in under 20 minutes, but it was very compelling.

If this is what I think it’s referring to, then Yes. In the same way that a refutation of a previously stated position is part of an argument.

Repeating that refutation verbatim, while calling it your intellectual work does not actually make it so.

It shows, at best, your ability to remember things.

As much as a can of soup is.

As a performance maybe? Frankly I don’t give a flying fuck about how those rich kids entertain themselves. It’s like a jobs program for creative kids from big moneyed families. It has no bearing on what happens in the rest of the art world and it could not matter less when considering how credit and attribution work in commercial art.

Sure, but you can't tell your photograph to make another one, or steal a soul. That's what AI is for.

Exactly. This was ultimately the work of a human who used AI to create something.

Just like the incredible pizza I made when I picked up my phone and said to it “one large supreme”, and there it was at my door, 30 minutes later. I really love how good the stuffed crust I made came out. /s

You can't speak to oil paint in English and get a picture.

Until recently, the only such a "tool" used to be a human being.

There's no creativity or skill in handing something off to a generative model. At best, it's analogous to commissioning a work (as another poster said). It's not remotely like using a tool to create art.

People who say this must not really know just how much work goes into crafting the image via something like ComfyUI workflows, which is where the actual skill and creativity is. Now I don't know if this poster was that or whether it was just a single ChatGPT prompt, but look on places like r/StableDiffusion where people share their workflows, it's not really much different than EDM production, they're not actually playing the instruments but organizing them together into a cohesive pipeline.

You can't drop ship creativity and still take credit for it.

Grubhub is also a tool. If you order a pizza, you didn't make a pizza "just using a different tool"

Nope. At best, they are like commissioning work from a computer. When you commission a piece, especially as an art director, you often have lengthy conversations, exchange sketches, do multiple iterations, and have pretty fine-grained control over much of the final outcome. Art direction is a fundamentally creative process. But an art director would never, ever take credit for the piece. Why? They understand that so much of that artist’s voice, granular artistic perspective, and so much more are the building blocks of the piece. Image generators could provide reference material, make images for mood boards, and all sorts of other things useful in the artistic process, but the prompter is absolutely not making art.

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