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Last Tuesday my AI art piece got flagged by the gallery
I spent 40 hours refining a Midjourney output for a local show near Portland. The curator pulled me aside and said they don't count it as real art because "a machine did the heavy lifting." Thing is, I fiddled with prompts for 3 straight days to get that look. Has anyone else had their work rejected just because it involved AI?
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dixon.james7d ago
Used to be one of those people who thought AI art was just typing a sentence and hitting go. Then I actually tried it and realized how much work goes into getting something that doesnt look like generic garbage. Laura's point is fair though, @laura_chen41, because galleries do reject stuff for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with the tools. But the way that curator specifically mentioned the machine doing the heavy lifting tells me it was about the method, not the piece itself. Kind of reminds me of photographers getting told their work was cheating back when digital cameras first came out. People get stuck on what they think art should look like instead of what it actually takes to make it.
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Maybe they just didn't like the piece itself, not the fact that you used AI. Galleries reject stuff all the time for a hundred different reasons. 40 hours of prompt fiddling doesn't guarantee quality, it just means you spent a lot of time on prompts. Could be the curator was just looking for a polite excuse.
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the_fiona7d ago
Last Tuesday I was hanging out with my buddy who runs a vinyl-only record shop and he was telling me about this band that spent six months recording an album on a tape machine from the 70s. Some purist came in and said it wasn't real because they used modern microphones and digital mastering. It's the same thing with your situation, people get weird about tools they don't understand. My neighbor has a pottery studio and he still gets crap for using an electric wheel instead of kicking one with his foot. The hours you spent dialing in those prompts is real work, same as anybody tweaking settings on a camera or mixing board. The curator probably has their own hangup about what counts as craft, especially if they're in a local scene that prides itself on traditional methods.
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