Plan B Forum

An artwork created using artificial intelligence wins competition… and causes uproar

In a newsletter for the [Atlantic], in which [Charlie Warzel] wrote an interview with a defector from Alex Jones’s Infowars, he used 'Midjourney' to generate a cartoon-style image of Jones, which unleashed an uproar on Twitter . . . A few days later, in his apology article, he explained how he ended up using the image: “Instead of selecting a photo or illustration from Getty Images to go with the story, as I do for most of my newsletters, I decided to try something different and use an AI art tool to come up with the story’s accompanying image" . . .

. . . He was criticised for, among other things, “potentially giving other publications an excuse, or at least an idea, to cut corners on an art budget”. He also shared a conversation he had with Matt Bors, a cartoonist, writer, editor, and founder of the publication The Nib, to better understand the outrage towards his actions. Bors told him: “Technology is increasingly deployed to make gig jobs and to make billionaires richer, and so much of it doesn’t seem to benefit the public good enough… AI art is part of that. To developers and technically minded people, it’s this cool thing, but to illustrators it’s very upsetting because it feels like you’ve eliminated the need to hire the illustrator.”

Warzel goes on to promise that he will not use Midjourney again, unless he was writing about the technology and wanted to show an example. Closing off his mea culpa, he writes: “I am a doofus. At the heart of all of this is me not thinking things through. And so I’ve commissioned Matt Bors to illustrate me, a doofus, getting yelled at by people online. His excellent work will run as the art in a subsequent newsletter.”