An AI image wins the Colorado State Fair art prize

Jason Allen, a video-game designer from Pueblo, Colorado, won first place in the “emerging artist” digital arts division of the Colorado State Fair’s annual fine-art competition with Théâtre D’opéra Spatial, an image he generated using Midjourney, refined through hundreds of prompt revisions, then edited in Photoshop and upscaled with a separate AI tool. The prize came with $300 and, once Allen posted his win online, a rapid and largely hostile reaction from artists who argued the piece should not have been allowed to compete against traditionally made work.

The two fair judges said afterward that they had not known the piece was AI-generated when they scored it, but that they would have placed it first regardless; one, art historian Dagny McKinley, said it reminded her of Renaissance composition. A spokesperson for the Colorado Department of Agriculture, which runs the fair, compared the resulting controversy to earlier disputes over conceptual art, citing the notorious banana taped to a wall. The fair introduced a rule the following year requiring entrants to disclose AI use.

The episode became the first widely covered public argument about whether an AI-generated image counts as its creator’s own work, months before the release of ChatGPT made generative AI a mainstream concern. It also had a legal afterlife: Allen separately applied to register Théâtre D’opéra Spatial for copyright, and in September 2023 the US Copyright Office refused registration, finding the human creative contribution “de minimis” against the AI-generated content — the same reasoning the office had applied earlier that year to an AI-illustrated comic, Zarya of the Dawn.