The Colorado State Fair AI-Art Win, August 2022

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The Artist

The Colorado State Fair AI-art win was the August 29, 2022 first-place award in the digital-art category of the Colorado State Fair, given to Jason Allen for Théâtre D’opéra Spatial, a work created with the Midjourney text-to-image system. The win triggered the first major public controversy over AI-generated art.

Jason M. Allen was, in 2022, a thirty-nine-year-old designer from Pueblo West, Colorado. He was the president of Incarnate Games, a small Colorado-based tabletop-gaming company, where he served as lead game designer and art director. He was, by his own account, not a trained artist — he was a designer, a creative person, but not someone who made his living from fine art. He was, however, interested in the emerging technology of AI image generation, and he had been experimenting with Midjourney — one of the leading AI image-generation services — for several months before the State Fair competition.

Allen’s interest in AI image generation was, by most accounts, both aesthetic and practical. He was interested in the aesthetic possibilities — the ability of AI systems to produce images that were striking, unusual, and difficult to produce by traditional means. And he was interested in the practical possibilities — the ability of AI systems to produce concept art, illustrations, and other visual materials for his game design work. The two interests came together in his work on “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial,” which he developed over a period of approximately eighty hours, using a combination of three tools: Midjourney, for the initial generation of the image; Adobe Photoshop, for editing and removing flaws; and Gigapixel AI, an AI-based upscaling tool, for enlarging the image to the resolution required for the competition.

The process, Allen has said, was not a simple matter of typing a prompt and accepting the result. He generated at least 624 text prompts and revisions, he selected from many variations, and he spent significant time refining the image in Photoshop. The effort, he argued, was comparable to the effort that a traditional artist would put into a work of comparable quality. The AI, he said, was a tool — like a paintbrush or a camera — and the art lay in the way the tool was used, not in the tool itself.

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The Competition

The Colorado State Fair’s annual fine arts competition was, like most state fair competitions, a local affair — a showcase for amateur and emerging artists, judged by local art professionals, with modest cash prizes. The competition had several categories, including painting, sculpture, photography, and digital arts. The “Digital Arts / Digitally-Manipulated Photography” category, in which Allen entered, was for works created or manipulated using digital tools. The category was, in some ways, a natural home for AI-generated work — it was already a category that accepted digital manipulation, and the rules did not explicitly exclude AI-generated images.

Allen entered the competition in the “emerging artist” division — a division for non-professional artists, open to art students and amateurs whose income was “not significantly impacted by the sale of your artwork.” The division was, in some ways, a recognition that the competition was meant to be inclusive — to give amateur and emerging artists a chance to compete, alongside the professional divisions. Allen, who was a game designer rather than a fine artist, qualified for the emerging-artist division.

Allen disclosed his use of AI. He submitted his entry as “Jason M. Allen via Midjourney,” making clear that the image was generated using the AI tool. The two judges who evaluated the entry later said — through a State Fair spokeswoman — that they did not know that Midjourney used AI; they thought it was a digital art tool, similar to Photoshop. They also said that, even if they had known, they would have awarded Allen first place, because the image was, in their judgment, the best in the category.

The prize for first place in the digital arts category was three hundred dollars. The announcement, made on August 29, 2022, was, at first, a routine matter — a local artist winning a local competition, with a modest prize. But within days, the story had gone viral, and the competition had become the centre of a national controversy.

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The Controversy

The controversy began on social media. When news of Allen’s win spread, artists — particularly digital artists — expressed outrage. The argument was straightforward: Allen had not “made” the image. He had typed a prompt into an AI system, and the system had generated the image. The creative work — the composition, the colour, the lighting, the detail — had been done by the AI, not by Allen. To award him first place in a fine-art competition was, the critics argued, an insult to the human artists who had spent years developing their skills and who had entered their own, hand-made work in the same competition.

The criticism was, in some ways, a version of a broader critique of AI art that had been building for years. The critique — articulated by artists, critics, and ethicists — argued that AI image generation was, at its core, a form of automated plagiarism: derivatives of human creativity produced without credit, compensation, or consent. The AI systems were trained on millions of images, many of them copyrighted, created by human artists who had not consented to their work being used for training. The images that the systems produced were, the critics argued, derivatives of the training data — remixes of human creativity, produced without credit, without compensation, and without consent. To award a prize to an AI-generated image was, in this view, to validate a system that was fundamentally exploitative.

Allen defended his work. He argued that the AI was a tool, and that the art lay in the way the tool was used. He pointed to the eighty hours he had spent on the image, the 624 prompts and revisions, the editing in Photoshop, the upscaling in Gigapixel AI. The effort, he argued, was real, and the creative decisions — the choice of subject, the choice of style, the refinement of the composition — were his. The AI did not create the image on its own. It created the image in response to his prompts, his selections, and his edits. The image was, he argued, a collaboration between human and machine, and the human contribution was essential.

The debate was, by most accounts, not resolved. The arguments on both sides were, in their own terms, compelling. The critics were right that the AI system had done much of the visual work, and that the training data on which it relied was, in many cases, the product of human artists who had not consented. Allen was right that he had spent real effort on the image, and that the AI was, in some sense, a tool that he had used creatively. The disagreement was, at its root, a disagreement about what counted as “art” — about where the creative act lay, and about whether the use of AI tools diminished or enhanced the human contribution.

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The Broader Context

The Colorado State Fair controversy did not happen in isolation. It was, in some ways, the culmination of a series of developments in AI art that had been building for years. The foundational generative-model papers — the VAE (see B26), the GAN (see B27), and the diffusion model — had been published between 2013 and 2015. Neural Style Transfer (see B32), in August 2015, had been the first AI art to capture the public imagination, and the Prisma app, in 2016, had brought AI art to the mass market. The GAN-based image generators, led by StyleGAN, had produced the photorealistic fake faces that became ubiquitous in the late 2010s.

But the technology that made the Colorado State Fair controversy possible was a new generation of AI image generators, released in 2022, that were dramatically more capable than their predecessors. Midjourney, which Allen used, was one of these. DALL-E 2, released by OpenAI as a limited research preview on April 6, 2022, was another. Stable Diffusion (see B78), released by Stability AI on August 22, 2022 — just one week before the Colorado State Fair announcement — was the third. These systems, all based on diffusion models, could generate high-quality images from text prompts, and they were, for the first time, accessible to the general public. The combination — capable systems, public access, and a fine-art competition — was what produced the controversy.

The controversy was also, in some ways, a preview of the broader cultural debate about generative AI that would unfold in the following years. The questions raised by the Colorado State Fair — about creativity, about authorship, about the rights of human artists, about the ethics of training on copyrighted data — would, in 2023 and 2024, become central to the public conversation about AI. The lawsuits filed by artists against AI image-generation companies (see B80), the debates about AI regulation, the strikes by writers and actors concerned about AI’s impact on their professions — all of these were, in some ways, extensions of the debate that the Colorado State Fair had triggered.

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The Aftermath

The aftermath of the Colorado State Fair controversy was, for the competition itself, a change in the rules. Starting in 2023, the Colorado State Fair required all entrants in the digital arts category to disclose whether their work was AI-generated, and the competition’s guidelines were revised to address the use of AI tools. The change was, in some ways, a concession to the critics — a recognition that AI-generated work raised questions that the existing rules had not anticipated, and that the competition needed to adapt.

For Allen, the aftermath was a mix of notoriety and opportunity. He became, for a time, one of the most visible figures in the AI art world — a symbol, for both supporters and critics, of the new technology and its implications. He continued to work with AI art, and he defended his practice in interviews and public appearances. He also filed a copyright registration for “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial” with the United States Copyright Office on September 21, 2022 — a move that would, in time, produce its own controversy.

The Copyright Office, after initial review, refused to register the copyright. The Review Board’s final denial, issued on September 5, 2023, held that the work contained “more than a de minimis amount” of AI-generated content (which therefore had to be excluded from any copyright claim), and that Allen’s human-authored Photoshop edits were, on their own, insufficiently creative to support a copyright. The decision was, in some ways, a parallel to the broader debate: the Copyright Office, like the art critics, took the view that the AI system had done the creative work, and that Allen’s contribution — the prompts, the selections, the edits — was not sufficient to make him the “author” of the work in the legal sense. The decision was, for Allen, a setback, and it was, for the broader AI art community, a signal that the legal system was, at least initially, sceptical of AI-generated work’s claims to copyright protection.

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The Legacy

The legacy of the Colorado State Fair AI-art win is, by any measure, the legacy of the AI art controversy. The competition was the moment when AI art — which had been a niche pursuit, of interest primarily to researchers and a small community of digital artists — became a mainstream cultural issue. The image, the artist, the competition, and the controversy were covered by every major news outlet, discussed on every social media platform, and debated in every corner of the art world. The questions raised — about creativity, about authorship, about the rights of human artists, about the ethics of AI training — have, in the years since, become central to the public conversation about generative AI.

The legacy is also, in important ways, the legacy of a specific moment in the development of AI technology. The Colorado State Fair win happened in August 2022, just days after the release of Stable Diffusion, and just months after the limited preview of DALL-E 2. The timing was, in some ways, not coincidental. The release of these systems — capable, public, and accessible — was what made the controversy possible. Before 2022, AI art was a research curiosity, producing images that were interesting but not, by most standards, competitive with human art. After 2022, AI art was a mass-market phenomenon, producing images that were, in many cases, indistinguishable from — and in some cases superior to — the work of human artists. The Colorado State Fair win was the moment when this transformation became visible to the broader public.

The legacy is also, finally, a reminder of the cultural dimension of technology. The technology of AI image generation was, by August 2022, well-established. The systems existed, they were capable, and they were being used. But the cultural meaning of the technology — what it meant for art, for artists, for the creative professions, for the very definition of creativity — was not yet settled. The Colorado State Fair win forced these questions into the open, and it produced a debate that, as of 2026, has not been resolved. The questions — what counts as art, who counts as an artist, and what role AI should play in the creative process — are questions that the art world, the technology industry, the legal system, and the broader public are still working through. The Colorado State Fair did not answer these questions. But it made them impossible to ignore.

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What would change if more people understood the story behind the colorado state fair ai-art win? Who benefits from the current state of affairs, and who is left out? The conversation is worth having — with colleagues, with students, with anyone who uses technology without thinking about where it comes from.