Controversy erupts over prize awarded to AI-generated art

The winning artwork was created using the AI tool Midjourney – which turns lines of text into astonishingly realistic graphics. The award came with a $300 cash prize. AI tools to generate images have been around for years with companies such as Google and OpenAI being notable investors in these text-to-image systems. "I'm not going to apologise for it … I won and I didn't break any rules," Allen, who is from Pueblo, Colorado, told The New York Times newspaper in an interview published on Friday. However, many have taken to social media to express their anger and despair over the award, arguing it took away from the hard work invested by humans to physically create noteworthy art.