On September 2, one Jason M Allen of Pueblo West, Colorado, won the blue ribbon in the Colorado State Fair’s contest for emerging digital artists. While the public’s reaction was understandably incendiary (which we will further expand on later), the state fair had a division for “digital art/digital manipulated photography”. Let’s talk about why Allen hadn’t technically broken the rules.
If we look at it from a simplified technical perspective of how the AI program works: after being prompted by a “command”, the AI sets about collecting data from the Internet (in the case of an AI art generator, it’s any kind of visual media you can find online); the more specific the command, the more refined the AI gets as it pieces together the command, therefore the closer the generated image is to the command. Instead of a slightly random version of “a child in a yellow raincoat holding a red balloon”, you