Fair season is winding down, with its images of earnest young men and women leading impeccably groomed animals in a show ring. At least that’s what pops to mind for many of us in agriculture. But other stuff goes on at the fairs, and this year at the Colorado State Fair, there was a bombshell event seemingly unconnected to agriculture.
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This is the first-place entry in the digital art division. The title is “Space Opera Theater,” only in French, which I would only mangle hopelessly. I know, it looks like a slick science fiction book cover, but the uproar is over how it came to be.
Using an artificial Intelligence program called Midjourney, artist Jason Allen of Pueblo, Colorado created this image without a brushstroke or pencil line – he entered some carefully chosen text into the program and then took the image to be printed on canvas.
While the picture may not be your preferred type of art, such AI programs can tackle styles and subjects from impressionism to portraiture. In fact, they are doing so with rapidly increasing skill, originality, and acclaim. Using a process called diffusion, the program somehow matches the text with millions of online images into a mashup that has the art world flummoxed and artists terrified.
One reason is while we could kind of imagine AI taking over sophisticated automation and even complex management tasks like hiring decisions, we have considered the mystical skills of creative work like art of music as beyond the reach of computers. This picture is early proof that assumption may not be completely true.
While AI works essentially by trial-and-error on a massive scale, it can learn to pick out those very few results that people connect with, just like it sorts resumes with remarkable success to find the right people to hire. AI is also muscling into creative fields like writing – you have probably already read a computer-generated newspaper story, especially on the sports or financial pages. AI is even being used to write humor – a troubling development for me.
As the programs keep improving, which they do on their own, the output is slipping unnoticed into more and more creative fields, such as fashion design, for example. I’ll talk more about how AI might surprise us in agriculture, but we probably won’t believe it until, like Colorado fair-goers, we see it with our own eyes on our own farms.
