Well, that's it. Art is dead.

I mean, human artists have been trying to kill it for years, from Picasso to the guy who stuck a pickle to the ceiling and called it art.

Now we're so desperate for beauty as opposed to meaninglessness from untalented hacks that computer programs are out here producing award-winning art that blows most modern artists out of the water.

Jason Allen took an AI rendition he had the bot Midjourney create for him, up-sampled it, printed it on canvas, and entered it into the Colorado State Fair's digital art competition.

The AI image took first place.

And to be fair, it's amazing!

But is it really fair to pit AI art against humans? There are still some talented artists out there, and they are none too happy about the idea about being replaced by machines.

Genel Jumalon has reason to be upset. His digital paintings are pretty great.

Twitter use OmniMorpho uttered what is at the heart of every creative person watching artificially intelligent machines begin to hone in on the creative arts:

But Jason Allen maintains that there's an important human element to working in an AI medium:

"I have been exploring a special prompt that I will be publishing at a later date, I have created 100s of images using it, and after many weeks of fine tuning and curating my gens, I chose my top 3 and had them printed on canvas after unshackling with Gigapixel AI."

The operating word there is "weeks," which is the same dedication and skill that real artists devote to their craft. Anyone that's played around with Midjourney and Dall-e knows that the images they spawn are almost always anything but what Jason Allen showed off here. Usually they produce some horrifying amalgamation of H.R. Giger and H.P. Lovecraft.

I'm old enough to remember when there was a visceral reaction to digital art as being less than physical art, and yet here we are arguing about a digital art contest at a State Fair. I think we just need to redefine what we're talking about given the human element of these new tools. Maybe re-label it as AI-enhanced art?

Either way, it really is crazy what these new bots are capable of. I leave you with these images generated by typing in verses from the last book of the Bible, the Book of Revelation.

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