When designer Jason Allen won a blue ribbon at the 2022 Colorado State Fair with a piece generated using an artificial intelligence (AI) engine, it sparked controversy and in some cases outrage from artists.

Allen created his piece, “Theatre D’Opera Spatial,” using Midjourney, an AI program which creates images from textual descriptions. The controversy comes from the fact that the billions of images used to “train” the AI also likely include copyrighted works from other artists.

“Some artists are claiming that this isn’t art, because it was done by a computer,” said Plum artist Rob Power, who will present “Artificial Intelligence & Art” at the March 2 East Suburban Artists League meeting in Murrysville. “Then other people have said that the computer is just a tool, and there is work that goes into creating a piece like this.”

Murrysville artist Christopher Ruane sees AI as just another tool.

“Jason Allen’s piece is really beautiful,” said Ruane, who creates “augmented reality” art, blending photographs with digital imagery. In combination with an app he developed, called “ARt,” Ruane’s works come to life on smartphones, allowing viewers to interact with his pieces in a variety of ways.

“I’ve explored AI a little, but you look at it and see that Allen didn’t just push a couple of buttons,” Ruane said. “The AI program samples things based on your input, and if you work with it, there’s always some problem — a person will have six fingers, there will be some problem with the human form — but when I look at his piece, I can see a clear difference between his work, and people who are just messing around and having a program spit out AI images.”

Power said the controversy over the use of AI reminds him of a similar sentiment artists expressed when photography became a popular artistic medium.

“People have said i’m just pointing the camera and clicking,” he said. “But there’s a certain amount of skill and training involved. You have to know where to point the camera and have some familiarity with the tools you’re working with.”

Ruane said, however, that the creators of AI art engines should have some transparency in place.

“If I was going to write a paper, I’d have to cite my sources,” he said. “I think there should be some transparency about where Midjourney is getting images to train the AI. Companies create these huge data sets of images from the internet, so I’d caution artists who have their images online.”

Midjourney’s terms of service do include a take-down policy through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which allows artists to request that their work be removed from the program’s data set.

Several artists filed a lawsuit in January against Midjourney’s parent company of the same name, along with the companies Stability AI and DeviantArt, claiming they have infringed on the rights of millions of artists through the use of a program called Stable Diffusion, an AI engine trained by using images scraped from the internet without the original artists’ consent.

“Open-source software is great in that anyone can use it,” Ruane said. “But if they’re not auditing those images and finding out how they’re collected, that could become an issue later on.”

Power said he hopes the ESAL presentation will lead to a robust discussion about the future of art as it relates to AI.

“AI art is something new, and when that happens, you’re always going to have people coming out to criticize it,” he said.

“Artificial Intelligence & Art” will take place at 7 p.m. at Christ’s Lutheran Church, 5330 Old Logan Ferry Road in Murrysville.

For more on the East Suburban Artists League, see ESALart.org.

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